Phonon-assisted broadening in Bernal boron nitride: A comparison between indirect and direct excitons

We study the deep-ultraviolet emission in Bernal boron nitride as a function of temperature. The quasidegeneracy of indirect and direct excitons in Bernal boron nitride leads to their simultaneous recombination, allowing a comparison of phonon-assisted broadening in the two cases. Temperature-dependent measurements reveal that below 200 K, the efficiency of phonon-assisted broadening is one order of magnitude lower for the direct transition at 6.035 eV than for the phonon replicas of the indirect exciton. This striking effect results from the inhibition of quasielastic acoustic phonon scattering in the strong-coupling regime of the light-matter interaction, where the density of final states is reduced by the curvature of the polaritonic dispersion.