This lecture is a review of our recent advances in the application and further development of the theory for describing non-equilibrium electron dynamics in semiconductors, including both bulk and nanoscale systems.
Over the past three years, we have made significant progress in the development of the reduced density matrix method for describing these processes. The result of the efforts is the possibility of describing non-radiative relaxation taking into account electron spin polarization, the spin-orbit interaction, as well as the consideration of periodic systems with indirect optical transitions.
The ultimate motivation for this work is the need to develop low-cost, high-performance materials for solar energy harvesting and optoelectronic applications. For a theoretical description of the processes occurring in materials used for such purposes, it is necessary to take into account the interaction of the electrons and ions, including those in which non-radiative relaxation of electronic excitations occurs. This kind of description goes beyond the adiabatic approximation, and in this case, special modeling methods should be applied. It is the further development of one of these theoretical approaches, namely the method of the reduced density matrix."