On-demand confinement of semiconductor excitons by all-optical control

In condensed-matter physics, remarkable advances have been made with atomic systems by establishing a thorough control over cooling and trapping techniques. In semiconductors, this method may also provide a deterministic approach to reach the long standing goal of harnessing collective quantum phenomena with exciton gases. While long-lived excitons are simply cooled to very low temperatures using cryogenic apparatus, engineering confining potentials has been a challenging task. This degree of control was only achieved recently with devices realized by highly demanding nano-fabrication processes. Here, we demonstrate an alternative to this technology and show how a proper optical excitation allows to manipulate in-situ the exciton transport. Our approach is based on the optically controlled injection and spatial patterning of charges trapped in a field-effect device. Thus, electric field gradients are created and implement microscopic traps or anti-traps for the excitons dipole. Accordingly, any confinement geometry can be realized by shaping the spatial profile of a laser excitation. Hence, we succeed in trapping exciton gases in a density range where quantum correlations are predicted at our very low bath temperature.