Electron-hole superfluidity in strained Si/Ge type II heterojunctions

TL;DR

This paper predicts that strained Si/Ge heterojunctions can host observable electron-hole superfluidity and Bose-Einstein Condensation at accessible temperatures, leveraging their unique bandstructure and fabrication advantages.

Contribution

It introduces a novel material platform using strained Si/Ge bilayers for superfluidity, enabling device fabrication without insulating barriers and predicting superfluidity at practical conditions.

Findings

Superfluidity predicted at a few Kelvin.

Carrier densities up to ~6×10^{10} cm^{-2} are feasible.

Large mass imbalance may lead to exotic superfluid phases.

Abstract

Excitons are promising candidates for generating superfluidity and Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC) in solid state devices, but an enabling material platform with in-built bandstructure advantages and scaling compatibility with industrial semiconductor technology is lacking. Here we predict that spatially indirect excitons in a lattice-matched strained Si/Ge bilayer embedded into a germanium-rich SiGe crystal, would lead to observable mass-imbalanced electron-hole superfluidity and BEC. Holes would be confined in a compressively strained Ge quantum well and electrons in a lattice-matched tensile strained Si quantum well. We envision a device architecture that does not require an insulating barrier at the Si/Ge interface, since this interface offers a type II band alignment. Thus the electrons and holes can be kept very close but strictly separate, strengthening the electron-hole pairing attraction while preventing fast electron-hole recombination. The band alignment also allows a one-step procedure for making independent contacts to the electron and hole layers, overcoming a significant obstacle to device fabrication. We predict superfluidity at experimentally accessible temperatures of a few Kelvin and carrier densities up to $\sim 6\times 10^{10}$ cm$^{-2}$, while the large imbalance of the electron and hole effective masses can lead to exotic superfluid phases.