Magnetic-field driven hybridization of heavy- and light-hole Rydberg excitons in GaAs quantum wells

David de la Fuente Pico; Johannes Bürger; Antonio Gianfrate; Jesper Levinsen; Meera M. Parish; Daniele Sanvitto; Dario Ballarini; Francesca Maria Marchetti

arXiv · 2606.05267

Magnetic-field driven hybridization of heavy- and light-hole Rydberg excitons in GaAs quantum wells

David de la Fuente Pico·Johannes Bürger·Antonio Gianfrate·Jesper Levinsen·Meera M. Parish·Daniele Sanvitto·Dario Ballarini·Francesca Maria Marchetti

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Abstract

We present a combined theoretical and experimental study of ground and excited Rydberg exciton states in wide GaAs quantum wells exposed to a magnetic field in the Faraday geometry. We employ a multiband exciton model based on the Luttinger Hamiltonian, which captures valence-band mixing between heavy- and light-hole states induced by both the quantum well confinement and the magnetic field, and we develop an efficient numerical approach to solve for both ground- and excited-state excitons. The method treats Coulomb interactions, magnetic confinement, and band mixing on an equal footing, enabling a systematic characterization of exciton energies, oscillator strengths, and orbital composition. We show that band hybridization increases with magnetic field and is significantly more pronounced for higher excited states, where it sets in at lower fields and strongly modifies their properties. The theoretical predictions are validated by polarization-resolved magneto-reflectance measurements up to 9 T on GaAs/Al$_{0.4}$Ga$_{0.6}$As quantum wells of 20 nm width. We find excellent agreement for both the diamagnetic shift and Zeeman splitting of the ground state and the first four Rydberg excitons. Our results demonstrate that valence-band mixing plays a crucial role in determining the magnetic-field dependence of excited exciton states and must be properly included for a quantitative description of magneto-excitons in wide GaAs quantum wells.

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David de la Fuente Pico, Johannes Bürger, Antonio Gianfrate, Jesper Levinsen, Meera M. Parish, Daniele Sanvitto, Dario Ballarini, Francesca Maria Marchetti. 2026-06-03. Magnetic-field driven hybridization of heavy- and light-hole Rydberg excitons in GaAs quantum wells. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05267

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