Bound Excitons in Sr₂CuO₃

We investigated temperature dependent optical spectra of the one-dimensional chain compound Sr$_{2}$CuO$_{3}$. The charge transfer transition polarized along the chain direction shows a strongly asymmetric line shape as expected in one-dimensional extended Hubbard model. At low temperature the charge transfer peak shows a large blue shift and reveals additional sharp peaks at the gap. Even though many spectroscopic studies suggest that this material can not have a bound exciton based on the one-dimensional extended Hubbard model, we attribute the additional sharp peaks to excitons, which come to exist due to the long range Coulomb interaction.