Several recent experiments have reported an anomalous temperature dependence of the Coulomb drag effect in electron-hole bilayers. Motivated by these puzzling data, we study theoretically a low-density electron-hole bilayer, where electrons and holes avoid quantum degeneracy by forming excitons. We describe the ionization-recombination crossover between the electron-hole plasma and exciton gas and calculate both the intralayer and drag resistivity as a function of temperature. The latter exhibits a minimum followed by a sharp upturn at low temperatures, in qualitative agreement with the experimental observations [see, e.g., J. A. Seamons et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 026804 (2009)]. Importantly, the drag resistivity in the proposed scenario is found to be rather insensitive to a mismatch in electron and hole concentrations, in sharp contrast to the scenario of electron-hole Cooper pairing.

• Received 11 June 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.046801