Excitonic superfluids with quantum vortices

Project funded by Swedish Research Council (Grant for positions or stipends), grant 2016-04527_VR. Participating organisations named by the source: KTH, Royal Institute of Technology. Funded amount: SEK 3,200,000, as stated by the source. Runs 2017-01-01 to 2020-12-31. Keywords: Naturvetenskap, Natural Sciences, Fysik, Physical Sciences, Den kondenserade materiens fysik, Condensed Matter Physics. Source: OpenAIRE Graph, from the funder's project data (collected by OpenAIRE on 2025-12-04); national funding data, not CORDIS. Abstract given by the source: Excitons are bosonic bound states of an electron and a hole in a semiconductor. For 50 years, physicists have attempted to realize Bose-Einstein condensation in low-density exciton gases, without much success. However, from recent results I conclude that condensation at high densities has better chances: At high densities condensation starts at much higher temperatures, and high-density condensates emit light, and are thus much easier to detect than dark low-density condensates.I propose experiments to unambiguously demonstrate excitonic Bose-Einstein condensation. At high densities excitons have the character of many-body states, called electron-hole Cooper pairs. We will create a condensate of electron-hole Cooper pairs by cooling down a semiconductor in a dilution refrigerator to 10 mK and exciting the semiconductor with a short laser pulse. Bose-Einstein condensation will be visible in the light emission. The lifetime of the condensate will be controlled by an electric field. We will study quantum vortices that spontaneously appear in the condensate, a sign of superfluidity, and we will induce vortices ourselves using a nanofabricated superconducting micromagnet.The light emission from the Cooper pairs will give us a new tool to study Cooper pair physics.I will work on this project for 4 years and I will hire a postdoc for 2 years. We will do the experiments in the Quantum Nanophotonics lab at KTH and we will do the nanofabrication in the KTH cleanroom at Albanova.

Original source.

Source: OpenAIRE Graph: projects of national funders, OpenAIRE, from the project data of Swedish Research Council. Retrieved 2026-10-28. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (OpenAIRE Graph). Selected metadata, adapted presentation; the publisher's record is authoritative. No endorsement by the source is implied. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).

AI-assisted summary: The project "Excitonic superfluids with quantum vortices" is funded by the Swedish Research Council with a grant of SEK 3,200,000, running from January 1, 2017, to December 31, 2020. It involves KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, and focuses on excitonic Bose-Einstein condensation. Suggested technology pillar: simulation. Generated by AI from the public source text; it may contain errors and the original source is authoritative.