Attractive dipolar coupling between stacked exciton fluids

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the attractive dipolar interactions between excitons in stacked semiconductor bilayers, revealing how these interactions influence exciton properties and enabling exploration of new collective phases.

Contribution

It reports the experimental observation of attractive dipolar coupling between excitons in stacked bilayers and models the effects using a many-body polaron framework.

Findings

Attractive dipolar coupling modifies exciton distribution.

Binding energy increases due to dipolar interactions.

Results suggest potential for new collective phases.

Abstract

The interaction between aligned dipoles is long-ranged and highly anisotropic: it changes from repulsive to attractive depending on the relative positions of the dipoles. We report on the observation of the attractive component of the dipolar coupling between excitonic dipoles in stacked semiconductor bilayers. We show that the presence of a dipolar exciton fluid in one bilayer modifies the spatial distribution and increases the binding energy of excitonic dipoles in a vertically remote layer. The binding energy changes are explained by a many-body polaron model describing the deformation of the exciton cloud due to its interaction with a remote dipolar exciton. The results open the way for the observation of theoretically predicted new and exotic collective phases, the realization of interacting dipolar lattices in semiconductor systems as well as for engineering and sensing their collective excitations.