Exciton condensation and charge fractionalization in a topological insulator film

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An odd number of gapless Dirac fermions is guaranteed to exist at a surface of a strong topological insulator. We show that in a thin-film geometry and under external bias, electron-hole pairs that reside in these surface states can condense to form a coherent exciton condensate, similar in general terms to the exciton condensate recently argued to exist in a biased graphene bilayer, but with different topological properties. Such a `topological' exciton condensate (TEC) exhibits a host of unusual properties; the most interesting among them is the fractional charge +-e/2 carried by a singly quantized vortex in the TEC order parameter.