Radiative darkbright instability and the critical Casimir effect in DQW exciton condensates

It is already well known that radiative interband interaction in the excitonic normal liquid in semiconducting double quantum wells is responsible for a negligible splitting between the energies of the dark and bright excitons enabling us to consider a four fold spin degeneracy. This has also lead many workers to naively consider the same degeneracy in studying the condensate. On the other hand, the non-perturbative aspects of this interaction in the condensed phase, e.g. its consequences on the order parameter and the darkbright mixture in the ground state have not been explored. In this work, we demonstrate that the ground state concentrations of the dark and the bright exciton condensates are dramatically different beyond a sharp interband coupling threshold where the contribution of the bright component in the ground state vanishes. This shows that the effect of the radiative interband interaction on the condensate is nonperturbative. We also observe in the free energy a discontinuous derivative with respect to the layer separation at the entrance to the condensed phase, indicating a strong critical Casimir force. An estimate of its strength shows that it is measurable. Measuring the Casimir force is challenging, but at the same time it has a conclusive power about the presence of the long sought for condensed phase. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved