  A microscopic theory is developed to analyze the dynamics of exciton
formation out of incoherent carriers in semiconductor heterostructures. The
carrier Coulomb and phonon interaction is included consistently. A cluster
expansion method is used to systematically truncate the hierarchy problem. By
including all correlations up to the four-point (i.e. two-particle) level, the
fundamental fermionic substructure of excitons is fully included. The analysis
shows that the exciton formation is an intricate process where Coulomb
correlations rapidly build up on a picosecond time scale while phonon dynamics
leads to true exciton formation on a slow nanosecond time scale.

Strongly Correlated Electrons