The recent identification of strongly bound excitons in room temperature anatase TiO 2 single crystals and nanoparticles underscores the importance of bulk many-body effects in samples used for applications. Here, for the first time, we unravel the interplay between many-body interactions and correlations in highly-excited anatase TiO 2 nanoparticles using ultrafast two-dimensional deepultraviolet spectroscopy. With this approach, under non-resonant excitation, we disentangle the optical nonlinearities contributing to the bleach of the lowest direct exciton peak. This allows us to clock the ultrafast timescale of the hot electron thermalization in the conduction band with unprecedented temporal resolution, which we determine to be < 50 fs, due to the strong electronphonon coupling in the material. Our findings call for the design of alternative resonant excitation schemes in photonics and nanotechnology.1 arXiv:1703.07818v2 [cond-mat.mes-hall] 13 Jan 2018In the last decades, anatase TiO 2 has attracted huge interest as one of the most promising materials for a variety of challenging applications, ranging from photocatalysis [1,2] and photovoltaics [3] to sensors [4,5]. Since these technologies involve charge transport, thermalization and localization, they call for studies of the fast electron and hole dynamics, which provide a deep knowledge of the nature of the photogenerated/injected charge carriers and of the energy balance therein. These processes intimately depend on the details of the electronic structure and the presence of many body-effects in the material. Since anatase TiO 2 is a d 0 transition metal oxide, strong electron-electron correlations do not play a substantial role in the electronic structure [6]. Hence, this solid can be classified within the simple band insulator scheme, in which the forbidden energy gap arises as a result of band theory and is not a consequence of the strong on-site Coulomb interaction. However, different to conventional band insulators, anatase TiO 2 represents a peculiar example in which electron-phonon interaction and electron-hole correlation become relatively strong and influence the optical spectra. On the one hand, the presence of a moderately large electron-phonon coupling in anatase TiO 2 has often been invoked to interpret experimental results naturally pointing to the polaronic (self-trapped) picture [7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Notable examples include the low temperature green photoluminescence (PL) due to self-trapped excitons [14][15][16][17][18][19][20] and the room temperature electron mobilities whose values are limited by strong scattering with phonons [10]. On the other hand, many-body correlations have been thought to be negligible in this material and, as such, they remained widely unexplored. Recently, by employing state-of-the-art experimental [21] and computational techniques [21][22][23][24][25], the substantial role of electron-hole Coulomb correlations was unravelled in the anatase polymorph of TiO 2 . Strongly bound direct excitons were...
Ultrafast interfacial electron transfer in sensitized solar cells has mostly been probed by visible-to-terahertz radiation, which is sensitive to the free carriers in the conduction band of the semiconductor substrate. Here, we demonstrate the use of deep-ultraviolet continuum pulses to probe the interfacial electron transfer, by detecting a specific excitonic transition in both N719-sensitized anatase TiO and wurtzite ZnO nanoparticles. Our results are compared to those obtained on bare nanoparticles upon above-gap excitation. We show that the signal upon electron injection from the N719 dye into TiO is dominated by long-range Coulomb screening of the final states of the excitonic transitions, whereas in sensitized ZnO it is dominated by phase-space filling. The present approach offers a possible route to detecting interfacial electron transfer in a broad class of systems, including other transition metal oxides or sensitizers.
In a seminal paper, Mahan predicted that excitonic bound states can still exist in a semiconductor at electron-hole densities above the insulator-to-metal Mott transition. However, no clear evidence for this exotic quasiparticle, dubbed Mahan exciton, exists to date at room temperature. In this work, we combine ultrafast broadband optical spectroscopy and advanced many-body calculations to reveal that organic-inorganic lead-bromide perovskites host Mahan excitons at room temperature. Persistence of the Wannier exciton peak and the enhancement of the above-bandgap absorption are observed at all achievable photoexcitation densities, well above the Mott density. This is supported by the solution of the semiconductor Bloch equations, which confirms that no sharp transition between the insulating and conductive phase occurs. Our results demonstrate the robustness of the bound states in a regime where exciton dissociation is otherwise expected, and offer promising perspectives in fundamental physics and in room-temperature applications involving high densities of charge carriers.
The way nuclear motion affects electronic responses has become a very hot topic in materials science. Coherent acoustic phonons can dynamically modify optical, magnetic, and mechanical properties at ultrasonic frequencies, with promising applications as sensors and transducers. Here, by means of ultrafast broadband deep-ultraviolet spectroscopy, we demonstrate that coherent acoustic phonons confined in anatase TiO nanoparticles can selectively modulate the oscillator strength of the two-dimensional bound excitons supported by the material. We use many-body perturbation-theory calculations to reveal that the deformation potential is the mechanism behind the generation of the observed coherent acoustic wavepackets. Our results offer a route to manipulate and dynamically tune the properties of excitons in the deep-ultraviolet at room temperature.
The coherent manipulation of excitons in bulk semiconductors via the lattice degrees of freedom is key to the development of acousto-optic and acousto-excitonic devices. Wide-bandgap transition metal oxides exhibit strongly bound excitons that are interesting for applications in the deepultraviolet, but their properties have remained elusive due to the lack of efficient generation and detection schemes in this spectral range. Here, we perform ultrafast broadband deep-ultraviolet spectroscopy on anatase TiO 2 single crystals at room temperature, and reveal a dramatic modulation of the exciton peak amplitude due to coherent acoustic phonons. This modulation is comparable to those of nanostructures where exciton-phonon coupling is enhanced by quantum confinement, and is accompanied by a giant exciton shift of 30-50 meV. We model these results by many-body perturbation theory and show that the deformation potential coupling within the nonlinear regime is the main mechanism for the generation and detection of the coherent acoustic phonons. Our findings pave the way to the design of exciton control schemes in the deep-ultraviolet with propagating strain pulses. PACS numbers:2 New perspectives in the field of excitonics have recently developed from the discovery of strongly bound excitons that persist at room temperature (RT) in several semicondcutors, including organics [1], transition metal dichalcogenides [2] and transition metal oxides [3][4][5]. Despite their different origin, excitons in these classes of materials are strongly coupled to the lattice degrees of freedom. Indeed, since excitons can be viewed as quanta of electronic excitation energy travelling in the periodic crystal lattice, their motion is influenced by the fluctuating potential field due to lattice vibrations. On the fundamental aspect, exciton-phonon coupling is an intriguing type of boson-boson interaction that results in phenomena such as exciton self-trapping, spectral-weight transfers to phonon sidebands and Stokes-shifted emissions [6]. On the practical side, identifying the specific modes (optical or acoustic) that couple strongly to the excitons paves the way to the control of the exciton properties through the tailored application of strain, pressure or photoexcitation.Experimentally, the microscopic details of the exciton in the phonon field can be addressed via absorption and photoluminescence spectroscopy, since the shape and width of the optical spectra directly reflect the scattering of the exciton by lattice vibrations [7]. However, the information offered by these methods is mediated over all the coupled phonon modes.This calls for more advanced techniques that can yield information on the exciton-phonon coupling for specific lattice modes of interest in order to allow, in return, the phonon-selective control of the exciton properties. A powerful tool relies on setting a particular phonon mode out of equilibrium and monitoring the impact of the ionic motion on the exciton spectral features [8][9][10]. This is possible by time-and e...
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