Dropleton

Abstract: Fast optical pulses create a plasma of electrons and holes in a semiconductor in which excitons (pairs of holes and electrons) and combinations of two excitons emerge; now a stable liquid-like droplet of electrons and holes has been detected and called a ‘dropleton’. Excitons, plasmons and phonons are some of the better known quasiparticles — exotic entities that act in some respects like ordinary particles. New types do not come along all that often but here is one — a fundamentally new many-body particle named the 'dropleton'. Mackillo Kira and colleagues have identified this new quantum entity, a quantum droplet created when four or more electrons and holes (electronic vacancies) form a tiny correlation bubble via the Coulomb attraction, in direct-gap semiconductors such as gallium arsenide. The cover illustrates the pair-correlation function g(r) of quantum droplets — the central peak of the correlation function shows that electrons and holes are likely to be co-located and the ripples show that otherwise they form regularly spaced shells. Interacting many-body systems are characterized by stable configurations of objects—ranging from elementary particles to cosmological formations1,2,3—that also act as building blocks for more complicated structures. It is often possible to incorporate interactions in theoretical treatments of crystalline solids by introducing suitable quasiparticles that have an effective mass, spin or charge4,5 which in turn affects the material’s conductivity, optical response or phase transitions2,6,7. Additional quasiparticle interactions may also create strongly correlated configurations yielding new macroscopic phenomena, such as the emergence of a Mott insulator8, superconductivity or the pseudogap phase of high-temperature superconductors9,10,11. In semiconductors, a conduction-band electron attracts a valence-band hole (electronic vacancy) to create a bound pair, known as an exciton12,13, which is yet another quasiparticle. Two excitons may also bind together to give molecules, often referred to as biexcitons14, and even polyexcitons may exist15,16. In indirect-gap semiconductors such as germanium or silicon, a thermodynamic phase transition may produce electron–hole droplets whose diameter can approach the micrometre range17,18. In direct-gap semiconductors such as gallium arsenide, the exciton lifetime is too short for such a thermodynamic process. Instead, different quasiparticle configurations are stabilized dominantly by many-body interactions, not by thermalization. The resulting non-equilibrium quantum kinetics is so complicated that stable aggregates containing three or more Coulomb-correlated electron–hole pairs remain mostly unexplored. Here we study such complex aggregates and identify a new stable configuration of charged particles that we call a quantum droplet. This configuration exists in a plasma and exhibits quantization owing to its small size. It is charge neutral and contains a small number of particles with a pair-correlation function that is characteristic of a liquid. We present experimental and theoretical evidence for the existence of quantum droplets in an electron–hole plasma created in a gallium arsenide quantum well by ultrashort optical pulses.