Considerable effort has been devoted in recent years to developing an accurate and computationally-viable theoretical treatment of the THz response of semiconductor nanostructures that are excited by ultrashort optical pulses. Although most approaches, such as the semiconductor Bloch equations, employ an electron-hole basis, we have developed an excitonic approach that has significant advantages in many situations. Our approach includes the exchange interaction between excitons, the effects of the Pauli exclusion principle for the excitons (which are composite Bosons), and the dipole-dipole interactions between excitons. In this paper we review our excitonic formalism and apply it to examine the THz absorption of optically-excited CdSe nanorods and 2D GaAs quantum wells.
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