Technological advances allow for tunable lateral confinement of cold dipolar excitons in coupled quantum wells. We consider theoretically the Josephson effect between exciton condensates in two traps separated by a weak link. The flow of the exciton supercurrent is driven by the dipole energy difference between the traps. The Josephson oscillations may be observed after ensemble average of the time correlation of photons separately emitted from the two traps. The fringe visibility is controlled by the trap coupling and is robust against quantum and thermal fluctuations.
We consider in-plane electrostatic traps for indirect excitons in coupled quantum wells, where the traps are formed by a laterally modulated gate voltage. An intrinsic obstacle for exciton confinement in electrostatic traps is an in-plane electric field that can lead to exciton dissociation. We propose a design to suppress the in-plane electric field and, at the same time, to effectively confine excitons in the electrostatic traps. We present calculations for various classes of electrostatic traps and experimental proof of principle for trapping of indirect excitons in electrostatic traps.
The interface between superconducting Josephson junction and semiconductor position-based qubit implemented in coupled semiconductor q-dots is described such that it can be the base for electrostatic interface between superconducting and semiconductor quantum computer. Modification of Andreev Bound State in Josephson junction by the presence of semiconductor qubit in its proximity and electrostatic interaction with superconducting qubit is spotted by the minimalist tight-binding model. The obtained analytical results allow in creating interface between semiconductor quantum computer and superc…
We present a method for determining correlations in a gas of indirect excitons in a semiconductor quantum well structure. The method involves subjecting the excitons to a periodic electrostatic potential that causes modulations of the exciton density and photoluminescence (PL). Experimentally measured amplitudes of energy and intensity modulations of exciton PL serve as an input to a theoretical estimate of the exciton correlation parameter and temperature. We also present a proof-of-principle demonstration of the method for determining the correlation parameter and discuss how its accuracy ca…
We report on the principle and realization of a new trap for excitons -- the diamond electrostatic trap -- which uses a single electrode to create a confining potential for excitons. We also create elevated diamond traps which permit evaporative cooling of the exciton gas. We observe collection of excitons towards the trap center with increasing exciton density. This effect is due to screening of disorder in the trap by the excitons. As a result, the diamond trap behaves as a smooth parabolic potential which realizes a cold and dense exciton gas at the trap center.
We report on a method for the realization of two-dimensional electrostatic lattices for excitons using patterned interdigitated electrodes. Lattice structure is set by the electrode pattern and depth of the lattice potential is controlled by applied voltages. We demonstrate square, hexagonal, and honeycomb lattices created by this method.
We study transport of indirect excitons in GaAs/AlGaAs coupled quantum wells in linear lattices created by laterally modulated gate voltage. The localization-delocalization transition (LDT) for transport across the lattice was observed with reducing lattice amplitude or increasing exciton density. The exciton interaction energy at the transition is close to the lattice amplitude. These results are consistent with the model, which attributes the LDT to the interaction-induced percolation of the exciton gas through the external potential. We also discuss applications of the lattice potentials fo…
Coherent emission of light by a split excitonic Bose-Einstein condensate -- excitonic Josephson junction -- can be extremely sensitive to the Josephson phase established across the junction. As a result of this, the emission can be redistributed between different directions and even cancelled. The cases of the dipole- and of the quadrupole-active excitons are considered.
Hybrid semiconductor/superconductor devices constitute an important platform for a wide range of applications, from quantum computing to topological-state-based architectures. Here, we demonstrate full modulation of the interference pattern in a superconducting interference device with two parallel islands of ballistic InAs quantum wells separated by a trench, by acting independently on two side-gates. This so far unexplored geometry enables us to tune the device with high precision from a SQUID-like to a Fraunhofer-like behavior simply by electrostatic gating, without the need for an addition…
We report on the study of indirect excitons in moving lattices - conveyers created by a set of AC voltages applied to the electrodes on the sample surface. The wavelength of this moving lattice is set by the electrode periodicity, the amplitude is controlled by the applied voltage, and the velocity is controlled by the AC frequency. We observed the dynamical localization-delocalization transition for excitons in the conveyers and measured its dependence on the exciton density and conveyer amplitude and velocity. We considered a model for exciton transport via conveyers. The theoretical simulat…
The quantum Hall state at total filling factor $ν_T=1$ in bilayer systems realizes an exciton condensate and exhibits a zero-bias tunneling anomaly, similar to the Josephson effect in the presence of fluctuations. In contrast to conventional Josephson junctions, no Fraunhofer diffraction pattern has been observed, due to disorder induced topological defects, so-called merons. We consider interlayer tunneling in the presence of microwave radiation, and find Shapiro steps in the tunneling current-voltage characteristic despite the presence of merons. Moreover, the Josephson oscillations can also…
The screened Coulomb potential plays a crucial role in the binding energies of excitons in a thin dielectric slab. The asymptotic behavior of this potential is studied when the thickness of the slab is very small as compared to the exciton Bohr radius. A regularized expression is given and the exact effective 2D potential is derived. These expressions may be useful for the computation of the exciton binding energy in 2D or quasi-2D materials.
We study the photoluminescence (PL) of a two-dimensional liquid of oriented dipolar excitons in In_{x}Ga_{1-x}As coupled double quantum wells confined to a microtrap. Generating excitons outside the trap and transferring them at lattice temperatures down to T = 240 mK into the trap we create cold quasi-equilibrium bosonic ensembles of some 1000 excitons with thermal de Broglie wavelengths exceeding the excitonic separation. With decreasing temperature and increasing density n <= 5*10^10 cm^{-2} we find an increasingly asymmetric PL lineshape with a sharpening blue edge and a broad red tail whi…
We study ring shaped (Corbino) devices made of bilayer two-dimensional electron gases in the total filling factor one quantized Hall phase which is considered to be a coherent BCS-like state of interlayer excitons. Identical Josephson currents are observed at the two edges while only a negligible conductance between them is found. The maximum Josephson current observed at either edge can be controlled by passing a second interlayer Josephson current at the other edge. Due to the large electric resistance between the two edges, the interaction between them can only be mediated by the neutral in…
The magneto-electrostatic tailoring of the supercurrent in quantum point contact ballistic Josephson junctions is demonstrated. An etched InAs-based heterostructure is laterally contacted to superconducting niobium leads and the existence of two etched side gates permits, in combination with the application of a perpendicular magnetic field, to modify continuously the magnetic interference pattern by depleting the weak link. For wider junctions the supercurrent presents a Fraunhofer-like interference pattern with periodicity h/2e whereas by shrinking electrostatically the weak link, the period…
We demonstrate that perfect conversion between charged supercurrents in superconductors and neutral supercurrents in electron-hole pair condensates is possible via a new Andreev-like scattering mechanism. As a result, when two superconducting circuits are coupled through a bilayer exciton condensate, the superflow in both layers is drastically modified. Depending on the phase biases the supercurrents can be completely blocked or exhibit perfect drag.
We investigate the transport properties of a bilayer exciton condensate that is contacted by four superconducting leads. We focus on the equilibrium regime and investigate how the Josephson currents induced in the bilayer by phase biases applied to the superconducting electrodes are affected by the presence of an exciton condensate in the bulk of the system. As long as the distance between the superconducting electrodes is much larger than the exciton coherence length, the Josephson current depends only on the difference between the phase biases in the two layers. This result holds true in bot…
We propose and investigate a novel method for the controlled coupling of two Josephson charge qubits by means of a variable electrostatic transformer. The value of the coupling capacitance is given by the discretized curvature of the lowest energy band of a Josephson junction, which can be positive, negative, or zero. We calculate the charging diagram of the two-qubit system that reflects the transition from positive to negative through vanishing coupling. We also discuss how to construct a phase gate making use of the controllable coupling.
The investigation of the switching current probability distribution of a Josephson junction is a conventional tool to gain information on the phase slips dynamics as a function of the temperature. Here we adopt this well-established technique to probe the impact of an external static electric field on the occurrence of phase slips in gated all-metallic titanium (Ti) Josephson weak links. We show, in a temperature range between 20 mK and 420 mK, that the evolution of the phase slips dynamics as a function of the electrostatic field starkly differs from that observed as a function of the tempera…
We study spatially indirect excitons confined in a 10 $μ$m wide electrostatic trap of a GaAs double quantum well. We introduce a technique to control the amplitude of the electric field interacting with the excitons electric dipole, with nanosecond precision. Our approach relies on electronic waveforms corrected for the distorsions occurring at highest frequencies so that impedance matching is not necessary. Thus, we manipulate the confinement of cold gases without inducing sizeable perturbations down to sub-Kelvin bath temperatures.
We demonstrate the possibility to build stable Josephson $π$-junction stripes with exciton-polariton condensates. The stability of the $π$-junction between arbitrary long polariton stripes is achieved at low pumping by balancing the snaking instability with counter-propagating flows towards the junction. Not dissimilar from a dark soliton, the instability becomes relevant at high pumping leading to formation of vortex dipoles. The resulting structures can be stabilised to produce static lattices of Josephson vortices in straight and ring geometries. Our results build towards realization of qua…
Interlayer excitons (IXs) in 2D semiconductors have long lifetimes and spin-valley coupled physics, with a long-standing goal of single exciton trapping for valleytronic applications. In this work, we use a nano-patterned graphene gate to create an electrostatic IX trap. We measure a unique power-dependent blue-shift of IX energy, where narrow linewidth emission exhibits discrete energy jumps. We attribute these jumps to quantized increases of the number occupancy of IXs within the trap and compare to a theoretical model to assign the lowest energy emission line to single IX recombination.
We show that the appropriate on-off switching of Josephson coupling between exciton-polaritons in coupled semiconductor microcavities can reveal the full capacity for generating entanglement with a recently proposed method which essentially enhances the nonlinearity of the system. The improvement achieved with this simple modulation of the coupling is substantial over the case where it is kept constant. The suggested procedure is expected to find also application in other research areas, where nonlinear interacting bosons are encountered.
In this work we study quantum phase transitions and persistent currents in capacitively coupled one-dimensional Josephson-junction arrays. We will focus particularly on the roles of exciton-like pairs in the strong coupling limit in the presence of external gate charges and magnetic fluxes. We use the numerical density-matrix renormalization group method for the study in the full range of values of gate charge and magnetic flux. To clarify the various effects, we report the pair correlation functions and the exciton densities as welll as the persistent current.
We demonstrate an electrostatic trap for indirect excitons in a field-effect structure based on coupled GaAs quantum wells. Within the plane of a double quantum well indirect excitons are trapped at the perimeter of a SiO2 area sandwiched between the surface of the GaAs heterostructure and a semitransparent metallic top gate. The trapping mechanism is well explained by a combination of the quantum confined Stark effect and local field enhancement. We find the one-dimensional trapping potentials in the quantum well plane to be nearly harmonic with high spring constants exceeding 10 keV/cm^2.
We show that in electron-hole bilayers with excitonic order arising from conduction and valence bands formed by atomic orbitals that have different parities, nonzero interlayer tunneling leads to a second order Josephson effect. This means the interlayer electrical current is related to the phase of the excitonic order parameter as $J = J_c \sin2θ$ instead of $J = J_c \sin θ$, and that the system has two degenerate ground states at $θ=0, π$ that can be switched by an interlayer voltage pulse. When generalized to a three dimensional stack of alternating electron-hole planes or a two dimensional…
Recent experimental progresses have demonstrated the great potential of electronic and excitonic moiré superlattices in transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) for quantum many-body simulations and quantum optics applications. Here we reveal that the moiré potential landscapes in the TMDs heterostructures have an electrostatic origin from the spontaneous charge transfer across the heterointerfaces dependent on the atomic registry. This allows engineering tunable multi-chromatic superlattices through the interference of moiré potentials from independently configurable heterointerfaces in multil…
We consider a ground-state wide-gap band insulator turning into a nonequilibrium excitonic insulator (NEQ-EI) upon visiting properly selected and physically relevant highly excited states. The NEQ-EI phase, characterized by self-sustained oscillations of the complex order parameter, neatly follows from a Nonequilibrium Green's Function treatment on the Konstantinov-Perel' contour. We present the first {\em ab initio} band structure of LiF, a ground-state bulk insulator, in different NEQ-EI states and show that these states can be generated by currently available pump pulses. We highlight two g…
We analyzed multimode Josephson junctions with exciton-polaritons (polaritonic Josephson junctions) when several coupling mechanisms of fundamental and excited states are present. The applied method is based on Keldysh-Green function formalism and takes into account polariton pseudospin. We found that mean value of circular polarization degree in intrinsic Josephson oscillations and microscopic quantum self-trapping follow an oscillator behavior whose renormalizes due to intermode interactions. The effect of an additional transfer of particles over junction barrier occurring in multimode appro…
Proximity induced quantum coherence of electrons in multi-terminal voltage-driven hybrid normal-superconducting nanostructures may result in a non-trivial interplay between topology-dependent Josephson and Aharonov-Bohm effects. We elucidate a trade-off between stimulation of the voltage-dependent Josephson current due to non-equilibrium effects and quantum dephasing of quasiparticles causing reduction of both Josephson and Aharonov-Bohm currents. We also predict phase-shifted quantum coherent oscillations of the induced electrostatic potential as a function of the externally applied magnetic …
In 1H monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide, the inversion symmetry is broken, while the reflection symmetry is maintained. On the contrary, in the bilayer, the inversion symmetry is restored, but the reflection symmetry is broken. As a consequence of these contrasting symmetries, here we show that bilayer WS$_2$ exhibits a quantum confined Stark effect (QCSE) that is linear with the applied out-of-plane electric field, in contrary to a quadratic one for a monolayer. The interplay between the unique layer degree of freedom in the bilayer and the field driven partial inter-conversion betwee…
A textbook example of quantum mechanical effects is the coupling of two states through a tunnel barrier. In the case of macroscopic quantum states subject to interactions, the tunnel coupling gives rise to Josephson phenomena including Rabi oscillations, the a.c. and d.c. effects, or macroscopic self-trapping depending on whether tunnelling or interactions dominate. Non-linear Josephson physics, observed in superfluid helium and atomic condensates, has remained inaccessible in photonic systems due to the required effective photon-photon interactions. We report on the observation of non-linear …
Scattering of excitons by free carriers is a phenomena which is especially important when considering moderately to heavily doped semiconductors in low temperature experiments, where the interaction of excitons with acoustic and optical phonons is reduced. In this paper, we consider the scattering of excitons by free carriers in monolayer hexagonal Boron Nitride encapsulated by a dielectric medium. We describe the excitonic states by variational wave functions, modeling the electrostatic interaction via the Rytova--Keldysh potential. Making the distinction between elastic and inelastic scatter…
We develop a theory of interlayer tunneling in the exciton condensate of bilayer quantum Hall systems, which predicts strongly enhanced, but finite, tunneling conductance peaks near zero bias even at zero temperature. It is emphasized that, though this strongly enhanced tunneling originates from spontaneous interlayer phase coherence, it is fundamentally not the Josephson effect. Because of strong interlayer correlation, the bilayer system behaves as a single system so that conventional tunneling theories treating two layers as independent systems are not applicable. Based on our theory, we co…
The objective of this work is to numerically integrate in space and time the effective-mass Schrodinger equation for an excitonic wave packet in a coupled quantum-well system under a time-dependent electric field. Taking as a starting point a time-dependent Hartree potential, we derive the nonlinear dynamical evolution of the excitonic wave function. We found that the system resonant condition can be modified owing to the reaction field generated by a charge dynamically trapped in the quantum-well pair. As a result, this study raises a broader question: is it possible to create an electrostati…
We propose a tunable topological Josephson junction in silicene where electrostatic gates could switch between a trivial and a topological junction. These aspects are a consequence of a tunable phase transition of the topologically confined valley-chiral states from a spin-degenerate to a spin-helical regime. We calculate the Andreev bound states in such a junction analytically using a low-energy approximation to the tight-binding model of silicene in proximity to s-wave superconductors as well as numerically in the short- and long-junction regime and in the presence of intervalley scattering.…
Understanding the dynamics of excitons in two dimensional semiconductors requires a theory that incorporates the essential physics distinct from their three-dimensional counterparts. In addition to the modified dielectric environment, single-particle states with strongly non-parabolic dispersion appear in many two-dimensional band structures, so that "effective mass" is ill-defined. Focusing on electrostatically-biased bilayer graphene as an example where quartic (and higher) dispersion terms are necessary, we present a semi-analytic theory used to investigate the properties of ground and exci…
Exciton-polaritons can condense to a macroscopic quantum state through a non-equilibrium process of pumping and decay. In recent experiments, polariton condensates are used to observe, for a short time, nonlinear Josephson phenomena by coupling two condensates. However, it is still not clear how these phenomena are affected by the pumping and decay at long times and how the coupling alters the polariton condensation. Here, we consider a polariton Josephson junction pumped on one side and study its dynamics within a mean-field theory. The Josephson current is found to give rise to multi-stabili…
Magnetoluminescence of spatially indirect dipolar excitons collected in 25 nm GaAs/AlGaAs single quantum well within a lateral potential trap has been studied in perpendicular magnetic field in Faraday geometry. The paramagnetic spin splitting of the luminescence line of the heavy-hole excitons in the trap centre is completely compensated at magnetic fields below critical value, around 2 Tesla. The effect of spin-splitting compensation is caused by the exchange interaction in dense exciton Bose gas which is in qualitative agreement with the existing theoretical concepts. In the range of low ma…
With gate-defined electrostatic traps fabricated on a double quantum well we are able to realize an optically active and voltage-tunable quantum dot confining individual, long-living, spatially indirect excitons. We study the transition from multi excitons down to a single indirect exciton. In the few exciton regime, we observe discrete emission lines reflecting the interplay of dipolar interexcitonic repulsion and spatial quantization. The quantum dot states are tunable by gate voltage and employing a magnetic field results in a diamagnetic shift. The scheme introduces a new gate-defined plat…
