Semiconductor excitons are commonly seen as hydrogen atom. This analogy requires a unique hole mass. In reality, this is not so due to the complexity of the semiconductor band structure. The precise consequences on the exciton physics of the Coulomb coupling between heavy and light holes remain a tricky open problem. Through an “optimized perturbative” approach that uses excitons with a flexible hole mass as a basis, we show that for zero exciton wave vector, the heavy-light hole mass difference does not split the $(2\times 4)$ exciton degeneracy in zinc-blende-like semiconductors, the hole mass for binding energy being close to the average mass inverse. By contrast, for nonzero exciton wave vector that physically breaks the crystal symmetry, the exciton degeneracy splits into two branches quantized along the exciton wave vector, with nontrivial center-of-mass dependence not only on the heavy and light hole masses, but also on the electron mass.

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• Excitons
• Optoelectronics
• Bose-Einstein condensates
• III-V semiconductors
• Quantum many-body systems
• Perturbation theory
• Variational approach