Tunable Quantum Traps tagged posts

Tunable Quantum Traps for Excitons

Visualisation of the electrical trap
A laser beam (orange) creates excitons (purple) that are trapped inside the semicondcutor material by electric fields. (Image: Puneet Murthy / ETH Zurich)

Researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded for the first time in trapping excitons—quasiparticles consisting of negatively charged electrons and positively charged holes—in a semiconductor material using controllable electric fields. The new technique is important for creating single photon sources as well as for basic research.

In semiconductor materials, electric current can be conducted both by electrons and by positively charged holes, or missing electrons. Light hitting the material can also excite electrons to a higher energy band, leaving behind a hole in the original band...

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