Theory of photoluminescence in semiconductors

A theory is presented that relates the luminescence signal of a semiconduct or to the current-density correlation function. It allows the calculation o f the luminescence spectrum for nonthermal carrier distributions by means o f solving the Bethe-Salpeter equation for the polarization. The present met hod passes important consistency checks and overcomes some limitations and shortcomings of previous approaches. A detailed comparison is made with pre vious results and numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the usefu lness of the present method.