Monique Combescot, Shiue-Yuan Shiau Excitons and Cooper Pairs

Annotation

This book bridges a gap between two major communities of Condensed Matter Physics, Semiconductors and Superconductors, that have thrived independently. Through an original perspective that their key particles, excitons and Cooper pairs, are composite bosons, the authors raise fundamental questions of current interest: how does the Pauli exclusion principle wield its power on the fermionic components of bosonic particles at a microscopic level and how this affects themacroscopic physics? What can we learn from Wannier and Frenkel excitons and from Cooper pairs that helps us understand "bosonic condensation" of composite bosons and its difference from Bose-Einstein condensation of elementary bosons? The authors start from solid mathematical and physicalfoundation to derive excitons and Cooper pairs. They further introduce Shiva diagrams as a graphic support to grasp the many-body physics induced by fermion exchange - a novel mechanism not visualized by standard Feynman diagrams. Advanced undergraduate or graduate students in physics with no prior background will benefit from this book. The developed concepts and methodology should also be useful to present researches on ultracold atomic gases, exciton-polaritons, and quantuminformation.