We consider dipolar bosons in two tubes of one-dimensional lattices, where the dipoles are aligned to be maximally repulsive and the particle filling fraction is the same in each tube. In the classical limit of zero inter-site hopping, the particles
arrange themselves into an ordered crystal for any rational filling fraction, forming a complete devils staircase like in the single tube case. Turning on hopping within each tube then gives rise to a competition between the crystalline Mott phases and a liquid of defects or solitons. However, for the two-tube case, we find that solitons from different tubes can bind into pairs for certain topologies of the filling fraction. This provides an intriguing example of pairing that is purely driven by correlations close to a Mott insulator.
We calculate the photoluminescence spectrum and lifetime of a biexciton in a semiconductor using Fermis golden rule. Our biexciton wavefunction is obtained using a Quantum Monte Carlo calculation. We consider a recombination process where one of the
excitons within the biexciton annihilates. For hole masses greater than or equal to the electron mass, we find that the surviving exciton is most likely to populate the ground state. We also investigate how the confinement of excitons in a quantum dot would modify the lifetime in the limit of a large quantum dot where confinement principally affects the centre of mass wavefunction. The lifetimes we obtain are in reasonable agreement with experimental values. Our calculation can be used as a benchmark for comparison with approximate methods.
