Observation of a superfluid-to-insulator transition of bilayer excitons.

Abstract

One of the most remarkable properties associated with Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) is superfluidity, in which the system exhibits zero viscosity and flows without dissipation. The superfluid phase has been observed in wide-ranging bosonic systems spanning naturally occurring quantum fluids, such as liquid helium, to engineered platforms such as bilayer excitons and cold atom systems^1-4. Theoretical works have proposed that interactions could drive the BEC ground state into another exotic phase that simultaneously exhibits properties of both a crystalline solid and a superfluid-termed a supersolid^5-8. Identifying a material system, however, that hosts the predicted BEC solid phase, driven purely by interactions and without imposing an external lattice potential, has remained unknown^9-11. Here we report observation of a superfluid-to-insulator transition in the layer-imbalanced regime of bilayer magnetoexcitons. Mapping the transport behaviour of the bilayer condensate as a function of density and temperature suggests that the insulating phase is an ordered state of dilute excitons, stabilized by dipole interactions. The insulator melts into a recovered superfluid on increasing the temperature, which could indicate that the low-temperature solid is also a quantum coherent phase.