Recent femtosecond pump-probe experiments on Mott insulators reveal charge recombination, which is in picosecond range, i.e., much faster than in clean bandgap semiconductors although excitation gaps in Mott insulators are even larger. The charge response in photo-excited insulators can be generally divided in femtosecond transient relaxation of charge excitations, which are holons and doublons, and a second slower, but still very fast, holon–doublon (HD) recombination. We present a theory of the recombination rate of the excited HD pairs, based on the two-dimensional (2D) model relevant for cuprates, which shows that such fast processes can be explained even quantitatively with the multi-magnon emission. We show that the condition for the exponential decay as observed in the experiment is the existence of the exciton, i.e., the bound HD pair. Its recombination rate is exponentially dependent on the charge gap and on the magnon energy, while the ultrafast process can be traced back to strong charge-spin coupling. We comment also fast recombination times in the one-dimensional (1D) Mott insulators, as e.g., organic salts. The recombination rate in the latter cases can be explained with the stronger coupling with phonon excitations.
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