Strongly bound excitons in gapless two-dimensional structures

Common wisdom asserts that bound excitons cannot form in high-dimensional (d>1) metallic structures because of their overwhelming screening and the unavoidable resonance with nearby continuous bands. Strikingly we illustrate that this prevalent assumption is not quite true. A key ingredient has been overlooked: Destructive coherent effects are capable of thwarting the formation of resonance. As an example of this general mechanism, we focus on an experimentally relevant material and predict bound excitons in twisted bilayer graphene, which is a two-dimensional gapless structure that exhibits metallic screening. The binding energies calculated by first-principles simulations are surprisingly large. The low-energy effective model reveals that these bound states are produced by a unique destructive coherence between two alike subband resonant excitons. In particular, this coherent effect is not sensitive to the screening and dimensionality, and hence may persist as a general mechanism for creating bound excitons in various metallic structures, opening the door for excitonic applications based on metallic structures.