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arXiv:2603.18982 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Photoemission signatures of photoinduced carriers and excitons in one-dimensional Mott insulators

Taiga Nakamoto, Yuta Murakami, Naoto Tsuji

Published Jun 12, 2026• 0 citations

Abstract

We theoretically study photoemission spectra for photodoped one-dimensional Mott insulators that can host excitons, and show that their spectral characteristics differ qualitatively from those of photodoped semiconductors. In conventional semiconductors, photoemission spectra are well understood; free charge carriers generate spectral weight near the bottom of the conduction band, while the formation of excitons leads to replica features of the valence band appearing inside the band gap. In one-dimensional Mott insulators, on the other hand, strong correlations give rise to fractionalized elementary excitations-spinons, holons, and doublons-which fundamentally modify the photoemission response. We find that when photodoped carriers, i.e., doublons and holons, remain unbound, the photoemission spectrum directly reflects the dispersion of spinons, i.e., magnetic elementary excitations. In contrast, when a doublon and a holon form an excitonic bound state, replica structures of the lower Hubbard band emerge inside the Mott gap, carrying contributions from both spinon and holon excitations. Importantly, the distribution of the in-gap signal depends sensitively on the degree of doublon-holon binding. The origin of these spectral features is clarified through a combination of exact diagonalization and the slave-particle approach. These results indicate that photoemission from photoinduced carriers and excitons in strongly correlated electron systems can provide information on magnetic properties and carrier-binding properties.

DOI: 10.1103/bfhz-lhjk

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We theoretically investigate the light absorption spectrum of two-dimensional (2D) Mott insulators. We employ the numerical diagonalization method to calculate the light absorption spectrum with using the effective Hamiltonian for the extended Hubbard model, which is valid when the on-site Coulomb interaction energy

U

is much larger than the nearest-neighbor transfer integral

t

and the nearest-neighbor Coulomb interaction energy

V

. For

V=0

, the absorption spectrum consists of a broad band with a width of about

16t

and a sharp central peak, and the energy eigenstates contributing to the absorption spectrum do not have the antiferromagnetic (AF) spin order, when

U

is sufficiently larger than

t

. These features result from the spin-charge interplay inherent in the very strong correlation region where charge transfer term is dominant. With decreasing

U∕t

, the peak structure in absorption spectrum becomes unclear and some low energy eigenstates have the AF spin order, as a result of the spin-spin interaction term. For large

V∕t

, the dominant peak arises in the lower energy region of the spectrum. A large number of holon-doublon bound states, which have nearly the same charge but different spin structures, are responsible for this peak, in contrast to the conventional exciton state. This is also in contrast to the charge bound states in one-dimensional (1D) Mott insulators, where a single energy eigenstate dominates the optical transition moment as a result of the spin-charge separation. The essentially different absorption spectra between the 1D and 2D Mott insulators originate from the difference in the coupling between spin and charge degrees of freedom.

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We study the optical properties of an electron–hole two-band Hubbard model with interactions of electron–electron (hole–hole) repulsion U and electron–hole attraction U '. In the case of two types of correlated insulators at half filling, viz. , the Mott–Hubbard type and the biexciton type, interband linear absorption/gain spectra including excitonic effects are calculated analytically using two-site dynamical mean-field theory and ladder approximation. We show that an exciton-like peak structure emerges because of an “exciton” in the sea of correlated fermions when U ' is larger than a certain critical value. The binding energy of the photoinduced excitonic bound state and the spectral intensity are evaluated as a function of U '. The emergence and absence of the exciton-like peak suggests that there are two different insulating mechanisms in the Mott–Hubbard insulating state of the electron–hole system: one is attributable to only U and the other is attributable to both U and U '; the latter is called the excitonic Mott–Hubbard insulating state. The intrinsic difference of the mechanisms cannot be captured from only single-particle properties such as the density of states, but it appears clearly in optical properties reflecting two-particle correlations.