Hyperspherical formulation of impurity-bound excitons in semiconductors

Abstract

A hyperspherical formalism is shown to be an appropriate approach for the investigation of the three-particle complex corresponding to an exciton bound to a Coulomb center in a semiconductor. The ground- and excited-state potential curves and binding energies are calculated as a function of the mass ratio of the hole and electron, and the concept of a critical mass is discussed. The results that we have obtained are in very good agreement with variational calculations for several semiconductor materials.