Symmetry-protected intraband exciton-phonon scattering and its breakdown by mass asymmetry

Abstract

The coupling of excitons to lattice vibrations is typically treated via phenomenological models that artificially separate long-range Fr\"ohlich and short-range Holstein interactions. Recent analytical work has established that, in the delocalized limit, Fr\"ohlich scattering is suppressed by electron--hole interference. Here we present a model-space Bethe--Salpeter framework to evaluate exciton--phonon coupling across the extended-to-localized crossover. We establish a fundamental distinction between the \emph{inclusive} exciton--phonon coupling weight, obtainable via an exact completeness sum rule without summation over excited states, and the \emph{exclusive} intraband (internal-state-preserving) scattering amplitude that governs low-energy decoherence. We prove an exact symmetry theorem: for an inversion-symmetric relative-coordinate Hamiltonian with equal electron and hole masses, the intraband Fr\"ohlich vertex vanishes identically, protecting the exciton from low-energy polar phonon scattering. When mass asymmetry is introduced, the finite-momentum relative wavefunction acquires a complex phase twist that breaks this protection. By analyzing the long-wavelength limit, we derive a controlled small-$q$ activation law showing that the intraband vertex scales as $F_{00}(q) \propto \Delta q^2 \langle r^2 \rangle$, where $\Delta$ parameterizes the mass asymmetry. Finally, we compute the second-order polaron self-energy shift and demonstrate that mass asymmetry dramatically enhances phonon dressing, confirming that the symmetry theorem directly governs the many-body energy renormalization of the exciton. These results provide a rigorous conceptual framework for understanding the competition between long-range and local exciton--phonon coupling in polar semiconductors.