No Arabic abstract
The creation of moire patterns in crystalline solids is a powerful approach to manipulate their electronic properties, which are fundamentally influenced by periodic potential landscapes. In 2D materials, a moire pattern with a superlattice potential can form by vertically stacking two layered materials with a twist and/or finite lattice constant difference. This unique approach has led to emergent electronic phenomena, including the fractal quantum Hall effect, tunable Mott insulators, and unconventional superconductivity. Furthermore, theory predicts intriguing effects on optical excitations by a moire potential in 2D valley semiconductors, but these signatures have yet to be experimentally detected. Here, we report experimental evidence of interlayer valley excitons trapped in a moire potential in MoSe$_2$/WSe$_2$ heterobilayers. At low temperatures, we observe photoluminescence near the free interlayer exciton energy but with over 100 times narrower linewidths. The emitter g-factors are homogeneous across the same sample and only take two values, -15.9 and 6.7, in samples with twisting angles near 60{deg} and 0deg, respectively. The g-factors match those of the free interlayer exciton, which is determined by one of two possible valley pairing configurations. At a twist angle near 20deg, the emitters become two orders of magnitude dimmer, but remarkably, they possess the same g-factor as the heterobilayer near 60deg. This is consistent with the Umklapp recombination of interlayer excitons near the commensurate 21.8{deg} twist angle. The emitters exhibit strong circular polarization, which implies the preservation of three-fold rotation symmetry by the trapping potential. Together with the power and excitation energy dependence, all evidence points to their origin as interlayer excitons trapped in a smooth moire potential with inherited valley-contrasting physics.
Transition metal dichalcogenide heterobilayers offer attractive opportunities to realize lattices of interacting bosons with several degrees of freedom. Such heterobilayers can feature moire patterns that modulate their electronic band structure, leading to spatial confinement of single interlayer excitons (IXs) that act as quantum emitters with $C_3$ symmetry. However, the narrow emission linewidths of the quantum emitters contrast with a broad ensemble IX emission observed in nominally identical heterobilayers, opening a debate regarding the origin of IX emission. Here we report the continuous evolution from a few trapped IXs to an ensemble of IXs with both triplet and singlet spin configurations in a gate-tunable $2H$-MoSe$_2$/WSe$_2$ heterobilayer. We observe signatures of dipolar interactions in the IX ensemble regime which, when combined with magneto-optical spectroscopy, reveal that the narrow quantum-dot-like and broad ensemble emission originate from IXs trapped in moire potentials with the same atomic registry. Finally, electron doping leads to the formation of three different species of localised negative trions with contrasting spin-valley configurations, among which we observe both intervalley and intravalley IX trions with spin-triplet optical transitions. Our results identify the origin of IX emission in MoSe$_2$/WSe$_2$ heterobilayers and highlight the important role of exciton-exciton interactions and Fermi-level control in these highly tunable quantum materials.
Moire heterobilayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) emerge as an ideal system for simulating the single-band Hubbard model and interesting correlated phases have been observed in these systems. Nevertheless, the moire bands in heterobilayer TMDs were believed to be topologically trivial. Recently, it was reported that both a quantum valley Hall insulating state at filling $ u=2$ (two holes per moire unit cell) and a valley polarized quantum anomalous Hall state at filling $ u=1$ were observed in AB stacked moire MoTe$_2$/WSe$_2$ heterobilayers. However, how the topologically nontrivial states emerge is not known. In this work, we propose that the pseudo-magnetic fields induced by lattice relaxation in moire MoTe$_2$/WSe$_2$ heterobilayers could naturally give rise to moire bands with finite Chern numbers. We show that a time-reversal invariant quantum valley Hall insulator is formed at full-filing $ u=2$, when two moire bands with opposite Chern numbers are filled. At half-filling $ u=1$, Coulomb interaction lifts the valley degeneracy and results in a valley polarized quantum anomalous Hall state, as observed in the experiment. Our theory identifies a new way to achieve topologically non-trivial states in heterobilayer TMD materials.
The optical spectra of vertically stacked MoSe$_2$/WSe$_2$ heterostructures contain additional interlayer excitonic peaks that are absent in the individual monolayer materials and exhibit a significant spatial charge separation in out-of-plane direction. Extending on a previous study, we used a many-body perturbation theory approach to simulate and analyse the excitonic spectra of MoSe$_2$/WSe$_2$ heterobilayers with three stacking orders, considering both momentum-direct and momentum-indirect excitons. We find that the small oscillator strengths and corresponding optical responses of the interlayer excitons are significantly stacking-dependent and give rise to high radiative lifetimes in the range of 5-200,ns (at T=4,K) for the bright interlayer excitons. Solving the finite-momentum Bethe-Salpeter Equation, we predict that the lowest-energy excitation should be an indirect exciton over the fundamental indirect band gap (K$rightarrow$Q), with a binding energy of 220,meV. However, in agreement with recent magneto-optics experiments and previous theoretical studies, our simulations of the effective excitonic Lande g-factors suggest that the low-energy momentum-indirect excitons are not experimentally observed for MoSe$_2$/WSe$_2$ heterostructures. We further reveal the existence of interlayer C excitons with significant exciton binding energies and optical oscillator strengths, which are analogous to the prominent band nesting excitons in mono- and few-layer transition-metal dichalcogenides.
Moire superlattices formed in van der Waals bilayers have enabled the creation and manipulation of new quantum states, as is exemplified by the discovery of superconducting and correlated insulating states in twisted bilayer graphene near the magic angle. Twisted bilayer semiconductors may lead to tunable exciton lattices and topological states, yet signatures of moire excitons have been reported only in closely angularly-aligned bilayers. Here we report tuning of moire lattice in WS$_{2}$ /MoSe$_{2}$ bilayers over a wide range of twist angles, leading to the continuous tuning of moire lattice induced interlayer excitons and their hybridization with optically bright intralayer excitons. A pronounced revival of the hybrid excitons takes place near commensurate twist angles, 21.8{deg}and 38.2{deg}, due to interlayer tunneling between states connected by a moire reciprocal lattice vector. From the angle dependence, we obtain the effective mass of the interlayer excitons and the electron inter-layer tunneling strength. These findings pave the way for understanding and engineering rich moire-lattice induced phenomena in angle-twisted semiconductor van dar Waals heterostructures.
Accurately described excitonic properties of transition metal dichalcogenide heterobilayers (HBLs) are crucial to comprehend the optical response and the charge carrier dynamics of them. Excitons in multilayer systems posses inter or intralayer character whose spectral positions depend on their binding energy and the band alignment of the constituent single-layers. In this study, we report the electronic structure and the absorption spectra of MoS$_2$/WS$_2$ and MoSe$_2$/WSe$_2$ HBLs from first-principles calculations. We explore the spectral positions, binding energies and the origins of inter and intralayer excitons and compare our results with experimental observations. The absorption spectra of the systems are obtained by solving the Bethe-Salpeter equation on top of a G$_0$W$_0$ calculation which corrects the independent particle eigenvalues obtained from density functional theory calculations. Our calculations reveal that the lowest energy exciton in both HBLs possesses interlayer character which is decisive regarding their possible device applications. Due to the spatially separated nature of the charge carriers, the binding energy of inter-layer excitons might be expected to be considerably smaller than that of intra-layer ones. However, according to our calculations the binding energy of lowest energy interlayer excitons is only $sim$ 20% lower due to the weaker screening of the Coulomb interaction between layers of the HBLs. Therefore, it can be deduced that the spectral positions of the interlayer excitons with respect to intralayer ones are mostly determined by the band offset of the constituent single-layers. By comparing oscillator strengths and thermal occupation factors, we show that in luminescence at low temperature, the interlayer exciton peak becomes dominant, while in absorption it is almost invisible.