Coherent many-body exciton in van der Waals antiferromagnet NiPS₃

An exciton is the bosonic quasiparticle of electron-hole pairs bound by the Coulomb interaction¹. Bose-Einstein condensation of this exciton state has long been the subject of speculation in various model systems^2,3, and examples have been found more recently in optical lattices and two-dimensional materials^4-9. Unlike these conventional excitons formed from extended Bloch states^4-9, excitonic bound states from intrinsically many-body localized states are rare. Here we show that a spin-orbit-entangled exciton state appears below the Néel temperature of 150 kelvin in NiPS₃, an antiferromagnetic van der Waals material. It arises intrinsically from the archetypal many-body states of the Zhang-Rice singlet^10,11, and reaches a coherent state assisted by the antiferromagnetic order. Using configuration-interaction theory, we determine the origin of the coherent excitonic excitation to be a transition from a Zhang-Rice triplet to a Zhang-Rice singlet. We combine three spectroscopic tools-resonant inelastic X-ray scattering, photoluminescence and optical absorption-to characterize the exciton and to demonstrate an extremely narrow excitonic linewidth below 50 kelvin. The discovery of the spin-orbit-entangled exciton in antiferromagnetic NiPS₃ introduces van der Waals magnets as a platform to study coherent many-body excitons.