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Excitonic condensation and superfluidity have recently received a renewed attention, due to the fabrication of bilayer systems in which electrons and hole are spatially separated and form stable pairs known as indirect excitons. Dichalcogenides- and graphene- based bilayers are nowadays built and investigated, giving access to systems with (i) only spin degeneracy, (ii) spin and valley degeneracy. Simulation studies performed in the last decade at $T=0$ for simple, model electron-hole bilayers, as function of inter-layer distance and in-layer carrier density, have revealed in case (i) the formation of biexcitons in a tiny region of parameter space and in case (ii) the formation of stable compounds made of 4 electrons and 4 holes (quadriexcitons) in a sizable region of parameter space. Of some interest is the relation of the properties of isolated biexcitons (quadriexcitons) and those of their finite density counterpart. In fact, the isolated biexciton has been repeatedly studied in the last years with simulations and other techniques. No simulations, instead, are available to our knowledge for the isolated quadriexciton, for which we present here results of the first quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) study. Stability with respect to the dissociation into biexcitons, and the pair correlations with varying the inter-layer distance $d$ are discussed.

Using quantum Monte Carlo simulations we have mapped out the zero temperature phase diagram of a symmetric electron-hole bilayer with twofold valley degeneracy, as function of the interlayer distance $d$ and in-layer density $n$. We find that the effect of the valley degeneracy is to shrink the region of stability of the excitonic condensate, in favor of quadriexcitons at small $d$ and of the four-component plasma at large $d$, with minor effects on the value of the excitonic condensate fraction. The enclosure of the condensate in a density window possibly explains why anomalous tunnelling conductivity, interpreted as signature of condensation, is observed only between two finite values of carrier density in graphene bilayers. Our phase diagram may provide directions to select device parameters for future experiments., Comment: paper: 5 pages and 4 figures; supplemental info: 5 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables

The spin susceptibility of a two-dimensional electron system is calculated by determining the spin-polarization dependence of the ground-state energy within the self-consistent mean-field theory of Singwi et al. (STLS). Results are presented for three different devices, viz. the Si (100) inversion layer, the AlAs quantum well, and the GaAs heterojunction-insulated gate field-effect transistor. We find a fairly good agreement with experiments for the Si (100) system, on most of the experimental density range, whereas the agreement for the AlAs and GaAs systems is less satisfactory; in all cases, however, it is vital to include the characteristic device parameters like the valley degeneracy, the finite transverse thickness, etc. Further, the STLS theory predicts an abrupt spin-polarization transition at a sufficiently low electron density irrespective of the valley degeneracy and/or the finite thickness, with the partially spin-polarized states remaining unstable. Moreover, in the Si (100) inversion layer, the spin-polarization transition is preceded by the simultaneous valley- and spin- polarization; for its zero thickness model, these transitions however grossly disagree with the recent quantum Monte Carlo simulations. This drawback of the STLS theory is traced to its inaccuracy in treating electron correlations, which in turn become more and more important as the number of independent components (spin and valley) increases., Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. B

By carrying out extensive lattice regularized diffusion Monte Carlo calculations, we study the spin and density dependence of the ground state energy for a quasi-one-dimensional electron gas, with harmonic transverse confinement and long-range $1/r$ interactions. We present a parametrization of the exchange-correlation energy suitable for spin density functional calculations, which fulfills exact low and high density limits., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, corrected Eq. 17, added new reference, submitted to J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. as proceedings of the SCCS2008 conference in Camerino, Italy

We find that the spin susceptibility of a two-dimensional electron system with valley degeneracy does not grow critically at low densities, at variance with experimental results [A. Shashkin et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 036403 (2006)]. We ascribe this apparent discrepancy to the weak disorder present in experimental samples. Our prediction is obtained from accurate correlation energies computed with state of-the-art diffusion Monte Carlo simulations and fitted with an analytical expression which also provides a local spin density functional for the system under investigation., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. B

We report measurements of the spin susceptibility in dilute (rs up to 10) AlAs two-dimensional (2D) electrons occupying a single conduction-band valley with an anisotropic in-plane Fermi contour, characterized by longitudinal and transverse effective masses, ml and mt. As the density is decreased, the spin susceptibility is significantly enhanced over its band value, reflecting the role of interaction. Yet the enhancement is suppressed compared to the results of quantum Monte Carlo based calculations that take the finite thickness of the electron layer into account but assume an isotropic effective mass equal to sqrt(ml.mt). Proper treatment of an interacting 2D system with an anisotropic effective mass therefore remains a theoretical challenge., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. B

We study the ground state properties of a quasi one dimensional electron gas, interacting via an effective potential with a harmonic transversal confinement and long range Coulomb tail. The exact correlation energy has been calculated for a wide range of electron densities by using the lattice regularized diffusion Monte Carlo method, which is a recent development of the standard projection Monte Carlo technique. In this case it is particularly useful as it allows to sample the exact ground state of the system, even in the low density regime when the exchange between electrons is extremely small. For different values of the width parameter b (0.1 a*_0 <= b <= 4 a*_0), we give a simple parametrization of the correlation energy, which provides an accurate local density energy functional for quasi one dimensional systems. Moreover we show that static correlations are in qualitative agreement with those obtained for the Luttinger liquid model with long range interactions., Comment: 15 pages, 13 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. B

We reply to the comment by Ying Zhang and S. Das Sarma on our PRL 94, 226405 (2005).

We present a variational Monte Carlo study of a model one dimensional electron gas on the continuum, with long-range interaction (1/r decay). At low density the reduced dimensionality brings about pseudonodes of the many-body wavefunction, yielding non-ergodic behavior of naive Monte Carlo sampling, which affects the evaluation of pair correlations and the related structure factors. The problem is however easily solved and we are able to carefully analyze the structure factors obtained from an optimal trial function, finding good agreement with the exact predictions for a Luttinger-like hamiltonian with an interaction similar to the one used in the present study., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures

We develop a dielectric matrix and analyze plasmon dispersion in strongly coupled charged-particle bilayers in the quantum domain. The formulation is based on the classical quasi-localized charge approximation (QLCA) and extends the QLCA formalism into the quantum domain. Its development, which parallels that of 2D companion paper [Phys. Rev. E 70, 026406 (2004)] by three of the authors, generalizes the single-layer scalar formalism therein to a bilayer matrix formalism. Using pair correlation function data generated from diffusion Monte Carlo simulations, we calculate the dispersion of the in-phase and out-of-phase plasmon modes over a wide range of in-layer coupling values and layer spacings. The out-of-phase spectrum exhibits an exchange-correlation induced long-wavelength energy gap in contrast to earlier predictions of acoustic dispersion softened by exchange-correlations. The energy gap is similar to what has been previously predicted for classical charged-particle bilayers and subsequently confirmed by recent molecular dynamics computer simulations., Comment: 53 pages including 15 Figures with their captions. Submitted to Physical Review E

Using available quantum Monte Carlo predictions for a strictly 2D electron gas, we have estimated the spin susceptibility of electrons in actual devices taking into account the effect of the finite transverse thickness and finding a very good agreement with experiments. A weak disorder, as found in very clean devices and/or at densities not too low, just brings about a minor enhancement of the susceptibility., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures

The ground-state behavior of the symmetric electron-electron and electron-hole bilayers is studied by including dynamic correlation effects within the quantum version of Singwi, Tosi, Land, and Sjolander (qSTLS) theory. The static pair-correlation functions, the local-field correction factors, and the ground-state energy are calculated over a wide range of carrier density and layer spacing. The possibility of a phase transition into a density-modulated ground state is also investigated. Results for both the electron-electron and electron-hole bilayers are compared with those of recent diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) simulation studies. We find that the qSTLS results differ markedly from those of the conventional STLS approach and compare in the overall more favorably with the DMC predictions. An important result is that the qSTLS theory signals a phase transition from the liquid to the coupled Wigner crystal ground state, in both the electron-electron and electron-hole bilayers, below a critical density and in the close proximity of layers (d <~ r_sa_0^*), in qualitative agreement with the findings of the DMC simulations., Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables

We report on a diffusion Monte Carlo investigation of model electron systems in low dimensions, which should be relevant to the physics of systems obtainable nowadays in semiconductor heterostructures. In particular, we present results for a one dimensional electron gas, at selected values of the coupling strength and confinement parameter, briefly analyzing the pair correlations and relating them to predictions by Schulz for a Luttinger liquid with long-range interactions. We find no evidence of the the Bloch instability yielded by approximate treatments such as the STLS and DFT schemes., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the 1999 International Conference on Strongly Coupled Coulomb Systems, Saint-Malo, France

We prove that the predicted charge transfer state in symmetric bilayers of two dimensional electron gases is always unstable at zero bias voltage, due to interlayer correlation and/or tunneling. This is most easily seen by resorting to a pseudospin formalism and considering coherent states obtained from the charge transfer state through rotations of the pseudospins. Evidently, the charge transfer state is stabilized by a sufficiently strong gate voltage, as found in recent experiments. We show that a simple model, in which the layers are strictly two dimensional, is able to account quantitatively for such experimental findings, when correlation is properly included., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Subm. to Europhys. Lett

We have obtained the one--body density matrix and the momentum distribution $n(p)$ of liquid $^4$He at $T=3D0^o$K from Diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) simulations, using trial functions optimized via the Euler Monte Carlo (EMC) method. We find a condensate fraction smaller than in previous calculations. Though we do not explicitly include long--range correlations in our calculations, we get a momentum distribution at long wavelength which is compatible with the presence of long--range correlations in the exact wave function. We have also studied $^3$He, using fixed--node DMC, with nodes and trial functions provided by the EMC. In particular, we analyze the momentum distribution $n(p)$ with respect to the discontinuity $Z$ as well as the singular behavior, at the Fermi surface. We also show that an approximate factorization of the one-body density matrix $\rho(r)\simeq \rho_0(r)\rho_B(r)$ holds, with $\rho_0(r)$ and $\rho_B(r)$ respectively the density matrix of the ideal Fermi gas and the density matrix of a Bose $^3$He., Comment: 10 pages, REVTeX, 12 figures

We apply density functional theory to study the freezing of superfluid {$^{4}\rm{He}$}, charged bosons and charged fermions at zero temperature. We employ accurate Quantum Monte Carlo data for the linear response function in the uniform phase of these systems, a quantity that has different behavior for large values of the wavevector than previously assumed. We find that, as a result of this {\it{exact}} behavior, different approximations in the density functional theory of freezing that involve linear response, all fail to correctly describe the crystallization in {\it{three dimensions}}, while yielding satisfactory predictions in {\it{two dimensions}}. This demonstrates the shortcomings of the currently popular density functional approximate theories to describe $3d$-freezing in the quantum regime. We also investigate the consequences of the exact asymptotic behavior of response functions on the form of effective interactions and polarization potentials in the electron gas, at small distances., Comment: 15 pages, REVTeX, 10 figures