We investigate the interaction between highly excited Rydberg excitons and charged impurities in the semiconductor Cuprous Oxide. We find that it is long-ranged and based on charge-induced dipole interactions. We demonstrate that we can utilize this interaction to neutralize impurities throughout the whole crystal - an effect we call purification. Purification reduces detrimental electrical stray fields drastically. We find that the absorption of the purified crystal increases by up to 25 % and that the purification effect is long-lived and may persist for hundreds of microseconds or even longer. Using a time-resolved pump-probe technique, we can discriminate purification from Rydberg blockade, which has been a long-standing goal in excitonic Rydberg systems.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2310.11726,
title = {Taming Charged Defects: Large Scale Purification in Semiconductors using Rydberg Excitons},
author = {Martin Bergen and Valentin Walther and Binodbihari Panda and Mariam Harati and Simon Siegeroth and Julian Heckötter and Marc Aßmann},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.11726},
year = {2023}
}