Many-body renormalization of the electron effective mass of InSe

Abstract

The layered semiconductor InSe has a wide range of attractive electronic and optoelectronic properties, in which the effective mass of the charge carriers plays a key role. Here, we study from first principles the many-body renormalization of the electron effective mass in $\ensuremath{\gamma}$-InSe, taking into account the effects of both electron-electron and electron-phonon interactions. Electron-electron interaction, treated within the many-body $GW$ approximation, leads to around 15% of the increase in the in-plane effective mass over the result from density functional theory, and a more than threefold increase in the out-of-plane electron effective mass. The surprisingly large directional anisotropy in the mass renormalization is explained in terms of the symmetries of band-edge wave functions. The mass enhancement induced by electron-phonon interactions, which we find to mainly originate from Fr\"ohlich electron-phonon coupling, is less than 10% at room temperature, indicating weak polaronic effect. After including the many-body renormalization effects, the calculated electron effective masses of InSe are 0.12 and 0.09 in the in-plane and out-of-plane directions, respectively.