Vm. Axt et S. Mukamel, NONLINEAR OPTICS OF SEMICONDUCTOR AND MOLECULAR NANOSTRUCTURES - A COMMON PERSPECTIVE, Reviews of modern physics, 70(1), 1998, pp. 145-174
A unified microscopic theoretical framework for the calculation of opt
ical excitations in molecular and semiconductor materials is presented
. The hierarchy of many-body density matrices for a pair-conserving ma
ny-electron model and the Frenkel exciton model is rigorously truncate
d to a given order in the radiation field. Closed equations of motion
are derived For five generating functions representing the dynamics up
to third order in the laser field including phonon degrees of freedom
as well as all direct and exchange-type contributions to the Coulomb,
interaction. By eliminating the phonons perturbatively the authors ob
tain equations that, in the case of the many-electron system, generali
ze the semiconductor Bloch equations, are particularly suited for the
analysis of the interplay between coherent and incoherent dynamics inc
luding many-body correlations, and lead to thermalized exciton (rather
than single-particle) distributions at long times. A complete structu
ral equivalence with the Frenkel exciton model of molecular materials
is established.