Interaction of charged impurities and Rydberg excitons in cuprous oxide

Abstract

We investigate the influence of a static, uncorrelated distribution of charged impurities on the spectrum of bound excitons in the copper oxide Cu$_{\text{2}}$O. We show that the statistical distribution of Stark shifts and ionisation rates leads to the vanishing of Rydberg resonances into an apparent continuum. The appearance of additional absorption lines due to the broken rotational symmetry, together with spatially inhomogeneous Stark shifts, leads to a modification of the observed line shapes that agree qualitatively with the changes observed in the experiment.