Microscopic simulations of the dynamics of excitonic many-body correlations coupled to quantum light

Abstract

The dynamics of semiconductor quantum wires and wells that are coupled to a single-mode quantum field are analyzed. Within a two-band tight-binding model the Coulomb interaction between electrons and holes is included on a microscopic basis and the light-matter interaction is quantized. The dynamics of the system is described by equations of motion for the relevant set of expectation values of the coupled electronic-photonic system. Starting from the initial condition of a single photon occupying the field mode, we study the dynamics of the mean photon number. To analyze effects arising from the many-body Coulomb interaction, we use an exact truncation of the electronic hierarchy problem by employing the fact that N photons cannot excite more than N electron-hole pairs. We compare Rabi oscillations with and without Coulomb interaction for different excitation conditions. When the quantum field mode is initially occupied by two photons, two interacting electron-hole pairs, i.e., biexcitons, can be generated which characteristically modify the dynamics. Within a consistent and fully-quantized approach we show consequences of biexcitonic many-body correlations that are coupled to a quantum field and discuss the obtained dynamics.