The dissociation of excitons into a liquid of holes and electrons in photoexcited semiconductors, despite being one of the first recognized examples of a Mott transition, still defies a complete understanding, especially regarding the nature of the transition, which is found to be continuous in some cases and discontinuous in others. Here we consider an idealized model of photoexcited semiconductors that can be mapped onto a spin-polarized half-filled Hubbard model, whose phase diagram reproduces most of the phenomenology of those systems and uncovers the key role of the exciton binding energy in determining the nature of the exciton Mott transition. We find indeed that the transition changes from discontinuous to continuous as the binding energy increases. Moreover, we uncover a rather anomalous electron-hole liquid phase next to the transition, which still sustains excitonic excitations despite being a degenerate Fermi liquid of heavy mass quasiparticles.

• Received 27 September 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.3.054605