Trapping kinetics of excitons in a potential well -: art. no. 205113

We describe the kinetics of bosonic excitons in a potential trap by rate equations in the basis of the single-particle eigenfunctions. We consider the interaction of the excitons with a thermal bath of acoustic phonons. Starting with an initial spatially homogeneous exciton distribution in the continuum, we show both a subcritical and a supercritical scenario for a spherically symmetric model potential. In particular, we observe for the case of Cu2O the buildup of a Bose-Einstein condensate within a microsecond time scale. However, the condensation time depends strongly on the depth and width of the trapping potential and the initial exciton distribution.