Light-induced topological superconductivity in transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers

Abstract

Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) host deeply bound excitons interacting with itinerant electrons, and as such they represent an exciting new quantum many-body Bose-Fermi mixture. Here, we demonstrate that electrons interacting with a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of exciton-polaritons can realise a two-dimensional topological $p_x+ip_y$ superconductor. Using strong coupling Eliashberg theory, we show that this is caused by an attractive interaction mediated by the BEC, which overcompensates the repulsive Coulomb interaction between the electrons. The hybrid light-matter nature of the BEC is crucial for achieving this, since it can be used to reduce retardation effects and increase the mediated interaction in regimes important for pairing. We finally show how the great flexibility of TMDs allows one to tune the critical temperature of the topological superconducting phase to be within experimental reach.