Quantum Pizza

The QSI Quantum PIzza Series is held on the 3rd Thursday of each month, from 12 - 1 pm. A diverse group of QSI Graduate Students and Postdocs will give broad overview talks on their research, or a "hot topic" paper in the quantum literature. The talks are intented to be at a very basic level -- intended for a wide audience of students, postdocs, and faculty from very different academic departments at UMBC.  Bonus -- free Pizza is served!

The speaker for the September Quantum Pizza is Edgar Rueda-Becerra, a Graduate Student from the Suarez Reserach Group in the Physics Department.

TITLE:  Excitons: the condensate we still have not seen

ABSTRACT: Bose condensation was predicted long before anyone saw it. In that state a large number of bosons occupy a single quantum state and behave as one wavefunction. The same claim was made for excitons long before there was a material where those pairs last long enough, and can be packed densely enough, for condensation to be tested. That is the bottleneck: the idea is only as good as the material. In a bulk semiconductor the pair disappears or breaks apart too quickly. In stacked sheets of transition-metal dichalcogenides the electron and the hole can be placed in neighboring layers, so the pair lives longer and its density can be set with a gate. Several groups have used that geometry and have seen pairing. They have not shown that the pairs occupy one coherent state. In this talk I will introduce the problem and present our group’s idea for how to look for that condensate.

Time/Location: 12:00pm, Physics Bldg. Room 401