Evidence of Nonperturbative Continuum Correlations in Two-Dimensional Exciton Systems in Semiconductor Microcavities

In nonlinear semiconductor optics, two-particle scattering is often being modeled successfully within the second Born approximation (2nd BA) of the Coulomb interaction. It is shown in this paper that, at low energies, such a perturbative treatment of Coulomb correlations applied to exciton-exciton scattering in two-dimensional systems fails even qualitatively (unless phenomenological or self-consistent dephasing processes are included in the theory). We show that the failure of the 2nd BA in two dimensions can be inferred from a comparison of our theoretical results with reported experiments of four-wave mixing signals from semiconductor microcavities.