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Excitonic Condensate in Flat Valence and Conduction Bands of Opposite Chirality
Gurjyot Sethi1, Martin Cuma2, Feng Liu1
1Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112, USA.
Abstract:
Excitonic Bose-Einstein condensation (EBEC) has drawn increasing attention recently with the emergence of 2D materials. A general criterion for EBEC, as expected in an excitonic insulator (EI) state, is to have negative exciton formation energies in a semiconductor. Here, using exact diagonalization of a multiexciton Hamiltonian modeled in a diatomic kagome lattice, we demonstrate that the negative exciton formation energies are only a prerequisite but insufficient condition for realizing an EI. By a comparative study between the cases of both conduction and valence flat bands (FBs) versus that of a parabolic conduction band, we further show that the presence and increased FB contribution to exciton formation provide an attractive avenue to stabilize the excitonic condensate, as confirmed by calculations and analyses of multiexciton energies, wave functions, and reduced density matrices. Our results warrant a similar many-exciton analysis for other known and/or new candidates of EIs and demonstrate the FBs of opposite parity as a unique platform for studying exciton physics, paving the way to material realization of spinor BEC and spin superfluidity.
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