Superconductivity with excitons and polaritons

A Bose--Einstein condensate of exciton polaritons coexisting with a Fermi gas of electrons has been recently proposed as a promising system for realisation of room-temperature superconductivity [Phys. Rev. Lett., 104, 106402 (2010)]. In order to find the optimum conditions for exciton and exciton-polariton mediated superconductivity, we study the attractive mechanism between electrons of a Cooper pair mediated by the exciton and exciton-polariton condensate and analyze the gap equation that follows. We specifically address microcavities with embedded n-doped quantum wells as well as coupled quantum wells hosting a condensate of spatially indirect excitons, put in contact with a two-dimensional electron gas. We show that engineering of the interaction in these peculiar Bose-Fermi mixtures is complex and sometimes counterintuitive, but leaves much freedom for optimization, making promising the realization of high-temperature superconductivity in multilayer semiconductor structures.