Experimental Study of the Exciton Gas – Liquid Transition in Coupled Quantum Wells


  Subhradeep Misra  ,  Michael Stern [2]  ,  Arjun Joshua [1]  ,  Vladimir Y. Umansky [1]  ,  Prof. Israel Bar-Joseph [1]  
[1] Department of Condensed Matter Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
[2] Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

Dipolar excitons in coupled quantum wells (CQW) offer a unique test bed for studying collective effects of an interacting quantum degenerate system. In this work, we study the exciton gas-liquid transition in such a system consisting of GaAs/AlGaAs CQWs. Below a critical temperature, TC=4.8K, and above a threshold laser power density the system undergoes a phase transition into a liquid state. We determine the density-temperature phase diagram over the temperature range 0.1 – 4.8K. We find that the latent heat increases linearly with temperature at temperatures below 1.1K, similarly to a Bose-Einstein condensate transition, and becomes constant at temperatures higher than 1.1K, up to TC. Resonant Rayleigh scattering measurements reveal that the disorder in the sample is strongly suppressed and the diffusion coefficient sharply increases with decreasing temperature at T<TC, allowing the liquid to spread over large distances away from the excitation region. We suggest that our findings are manifestations of a quantum liquid behavior.