Perovskites could be platforms for exciton condensates
Organic–inorganic perovskite materials are usually studied in the context of making solar cells and other photovoltaic devices. Now researchers from the Institute of Semiconductors at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing have shown that these hybrid halide materials could also be ideal platforms for realizing Bose–Einstein condensates of excitons (electron–hole pairs). Such condensates, which appear as vortex patterns, could be produced at liquid nitrogen temperatures – positively balmy, by the standard of the field – thanks to the long lifetimes of the excitons in the materials and their huge binding energies.
Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC) occurs when all the bosonic atoms or particles in a gas collapse into the same quantum ground state and can therefore be described by the same wavefunction. Such collapses are triggered by cooling the gas until the de Broglie wavelength of its constituent atoms or particles is comparable to the distance between them. Once in this state, the atoms or particles behave as a superfluid, flowing without friction.
