Book Description

This book bridges a gap between two major communities of Condensed Matter Physics, Semiconductors and Superconductors, that have thrived independently. Using an original perspective that the key particles of these materials, 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 their macroscopic 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 begin with a solid mathematical and physical foundation 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 in the absence of fermion-fermion interaction - a novel mechanism not visualized by standard Feynman diagrams. Advanced undergraduate or graduate students in physics with no specific background will benefit from this book. The developed concepts and formalism should also be useful for current research on ultracold atomic gases and exciton-polaritons, and quantum information.