Coulomb-correlation effects on the non-linear optical properties of realistic quantum wires

We review recent results on the linear and non-linear optical response of realistic quantum-wire structures. Our theoretical approach is based on a set of generalized semiconductor Bloch equations, and allows a full three-dimensional multisubband description of Coulomb correlation for any shape of the confinement profile, thus permitting a direct comparison with experiments for available state-of-the-art wire structures. Our results show that electron-hole Coulomb correlation removes the one-dimensional band-edge singularities from the absorption spectra, whose shape results to be heavily modified with respect to the ideal free-particle case over the whole range of photoexcited carrier densities.