Binding Energy of Two‐Dimensional Excitons in Strong Magnetic Fields

Abstract

AbstractBecause of current interest in the behavior of excitons in semiconducting quantum well systems in the presence of strong magnetic fields, variational calculations are performed of the exciton binding energy as a function of the magnetic field using two types of variational wave functions, a hydrogenic wave function which corresponds to the exact wave function in the limit of low magnetic fields and a Gaussian wave function which corresponds to the exact wave function in the limit of high magnetic fields. In the low and high field limits, the results correspond to those obtained by others using perturbation and WKB approximations. However, the variational results enable us to bridge the region of intermediate magnetic fields for which the previous approximation methods are not valid and to determine the region of validity of these approximation methods. Also calculated are the oscillator strength for 2D excitons as a function of magnetic field to determine the intensity of the exciton peak as a function of the field.