Excitonic Condensate in Flat Valence and Conduction Bands of Opposite Chirality

TL;DR

This paper investigates the conditions for excitonic Bose-Einstein condensation in 2D materials, emphasizing the role of flat bands of opposite chirality and showing that negative exciton energies alone are insufficient for excitonic insulator states.

Contribution

It demonstrates that flat valence and conduction bands of opposite chirality can stabilize excitonic Bose-Einstein condensation beyond negative exciton energies, using exact diagonalization in a Kagome lattice model.

Findings

Negative exciton energies are necessary but not sufficient for excitonic insulators.

Flat bands of opposite parity enhance exciton formation and stability.

Analysis suggests potential for spinor BEC and spin-superfluidity in such systems.

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 multi-exciton Hamiltonian modelled 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 a 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 EBEC, as confirmed by calculations and analyses of multi-exciton energies, wave functions and reduced density matrices. Our results warrant a similar many-exciton analysis for other known/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.