Hybrid interlayer excitons with tunable dispersion relation

When two semiconducting materials are layered on top of each other, interlayer excitons can be formed by the Coulomb attraction of an electron in one layer to a hole in the opposite layer. The resulting exciton is a composite boson with a dispersion relation that is a hybrid between the dispersion relations of the electron and the hole separately. In this talk I show how such hybridization is particularly interesting when one layer has a “Mexican hat”-shaped dispersion relation and the other has a conventional parabolic dispersion. In this case the interlayer exciton can have a range of qualitatively different dispersion relations, which can be continuously altered by an external field. This tunability in principle allows one to continuously tune a collection of interlayer excitons between different quantum many-body phases, including Bose-Einstein condensate, Wigner crystal, and fermion-like “moat band” phases.