Abstract
In a first part, a brief review of some excitonic properties is presented, with the accent put on their relevance with respect to the possibility of Bose-Einstein condensation. In a second part, recent experimental evidence is described, which supports the idea that excitonic particles may form a highly quantum fluid. In Cu20, the analysis of the exciton decay spectrum shows a gradual evolution of the gas from a classical regime at low densities up to a strongly degenerate one at high densities, with a chemical potential µ ~ 0. In CuCl excitons are unstable against formation of molecules (biexcitons). It is possible to generate directly a high density gas of biexcitons with momentum K ~ 0 by giant two-photon absorption. At low excitation, the observed molecular emission is in agreement with Maxwell -Boltzmann statistics. At high densities, strong deviations occur. In particular, the appearance of a sharp emission line is attributed to the presence of a Bose-Einstein condensate of excitonic molecules