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Solid-state physics

A historic experiment redesigned

Nature volume 514, pages 313–314 (2014)Cite this article

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Large quasiparticles known as Rydberg excitons have been detected in a natural crystal of copper oxide. The result may find use in applications such as single-photon logic devices. See Letter p.343

An exciton is a quasiparticle in a solid-state system comprising an electron and a hole (the absence of an electron). It has an energy spectrum akin to that of a hydrogen atom, and so may be considered as an artificial hydrogen atom in a solid-state environment, with the hole playing the part of the hydrogen's proton. The concept of excitons was first formulated in the early 1930s by Yakov Frenkel1, who predicted their existence in molecular crystals. A few years later, Gregory Wannier2 and Nevill Mott3 described these electron–hole bound states for inorganic semiconductors. In 1952, Evgeniy Gross and Nury Karryjew4 discovered these Wannier–Mott excitons experimentally in a copper oxide (Cu2O) semiconductor. Now, on page 343 of this issue, Kazimierczuk et al.5 report how they have redesigned this historic experiment to find excitons in a natural crystal of copper oxide. The excitons extend across some tens of billions of lattice sites of the crystal.

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Figure 1: The spectral signatures of excitons.

Ruben Seisyan/Ref. 4

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sven Höfling is in the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of St Andrews, St Andrews KY16 9SS, UK.,

    Sven Höfling

  2. Alexey Kavokin is at the Saint Petersburg State University, St Petersburg, Russia, and at the Physics and Astronomy School, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK.,

    Alexey Kavokin

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  1. Sven Höfling
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  2. Alexey Kavokin
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Correspondence to Sven Höfling or Alexey Kavokin.

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Höfling, S., Kavokin, A. A historic experiment redesigned. Nature 514, 313–314 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/514313a

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