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Elucidating the carrier density at which strongly bound excitons dissociate into a plasma of uncorrelated electron-hole pairs is a central topic in the many-body physics of semiconductors. However, there is a lack of information on the high-density response of excitons absorbing in the near-to-mid ultraviolet, due to the absence of suitable experimental probes in this elusive spectral range. Here, we present a unique combination of many-body perturbation theory and state-of-the-art ultrafast broadband ultraviolet spectroscopy to unveil the interplay between the ultraviolet-absorbing two-dimensional excitons of anatase TiO2 and a sea of electron-hole pairs. We discover that the critical density for the exciton Mott transition in this material is the highest ever reported in semiconductors. These results deepen our knowledge of the exciton Mott transition and pave the route toward the investigation of the exciton phase diagram in a variety of wide-gap insulators., We acknowledge support by the Swiss National Science Foundation via the NCCR:MUST, Contract No. 154056 (PNR 70, “Energy turnaround”) and the R’EQUIP Contract No. 206021-157773. We acknowledge financial support from the European Research Council (Grant No. ERC-2015-AdG-694097), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through RTG2247, and the Cluster of Excellence Advanced Imaging of Matter (AIM) Grant No. EXC 336 2056-390715994. The Flatiron Institute is a division of the Simons Foundation. Support by the Max Planck Institute—New York City Center for Non-Equilibrium Quantum Phenomena is acknowledged.

We use, for the first time, ab initio coupled-cluster theory to compute the spectral function of the uniform electron gas at a Wigner-Seitz radius of $r_\mathrm{s}=4$. The coupled-cluster approximations we employ go significantly beyond the diagrammatic content of state-of-the-art $GW$ theory. We compare our calculations extensively to $GW$ and $GW$-plus-cumulant theory, illustrating the strengths and weaknesses of these methods in capturing the quasiparticle and satellite features of the electron gas. Our accurate calculations further allow us to address the long-standing debate over the occupied bandwidth of metallic sodium. Our findings indicate that the future application of coupled-cluster theory to condensed phase material spectra is highly promising., Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures

Within a first-principles framework we show how many-body effects crucially modify the electronic and optical properties of free-standing Germanium nanowires. The electron-hole binding energy and probability distribution are found to depend on both wire size and orientation. Moreover, we observe an almost complete compensation of self-energy and excitonic effects for some of the analyzed quantum wires, which we explain as being due to their clusterlike atomic structure.