Bose-Einstein condensation of semiconductor excitons: 50 years later, at last!

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• Prof. Francois Dubin, Institut des NanoSciences de Paris
• Monday 12 June 2017, 14:15-15:15
• Mott Seminar Room (Mott Building Room 531), Cavendish Laboratory.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Joanna Waldie.

Semiconductor excitons constitute model composite bosons made of two fermions, an electron and a hole bound by Coulomb attraction. The excitons bosonic character is therefore dominant in a dilute regime so that it was envisioned already 50 years ago that excitons undergo Bose-Einstein condensation under accessible experimental conditions.

This talk emphasises the experimental and theoretical barriers that have prevented the demonstration of exciton condensation, prior to our recent works. As predicted by Combescot et al, I will show that a condensate of excitons is made by a dominant fraction of lowest energy and optically inactive excitons, coherently coupled to a weak population of higher energy and optically bright ones. The latter part allows detecting quantum statistical signatures of the four-component condensate, such as macroscopic spatial coherence below a critical temperature of about 1 Kelvin. As expected, I will show that quantised vortices emerge in the quantum regime, unveiling a superfluid character. All together, our experiments reveal a novel type of quantum gas completing atomic systems, but also superconductors and liquid helium.

This talk is part of the Semiconductor Physics Group Seminars series.

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• All Cavendish Laboratory Seminars
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• Mott Seminar Room (Mott Building Room 531), Cavendish Laboratory
• Neurons, Fake News, DNA and your iPhone: The Mathematics of Information
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