2025/12/16 by Enrico Perfetto, Gianluca Stefanucci, Perfetto, Enrico +1
Chemistry · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #2D Materials and Applications #Advanced Physical and Chemical Molecular Interactions #FOS: Physical sciences #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Quantum Mechanics and Non-Hermitian Physics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.14392
openalex publication_date 2025/12/16 · openalex created_date 2025/12/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Non-Hermitian physics is reshaping our understanding of quantum systems by revealing states and phenomena without Hermitian counterparts. While non-Hermiticity is typically associated with gain-loss processes in open systems, we uncover a fundamentally different route to non-Hermitian behavior emerging from non-equilibrium correlations. In photoexcited semiconductors, the effective interaction between electrons and holes gives rise to a pseudo-Hermitian Bethe-Salpeter Hamiltonian (PH-BSH) that governs excitonic states in the presence of excited populations. Within this framework, we identify a previously unknown class of excitonic quasiparticles - exceptional excitons - corresponding to exceptional points embedded inside the electron-hole continuum. Exceptional excitons emerge at the onset of population inversion, and represent the strongly renormalized counterparts of the system's equilibrium excitons. They are spatially localized, protected against hybridization with the continuum, and remain long-lived even in regimes where conventional excitons undergo a Mott transition. Crucially, exceptional excitons appear only when the PH-BSH is evaluated with non-thermal, resonantly generated carrier populations that support an excitonic superfluid. Ab initio results for monolayer WS2 explicitly demonstrate this scenario and show that exceptional excitons can be realized with existing ultrafast pumping techniques. We also identify distinctive optical and photoemission signatures that enable their unambiguous detection.