No Arabic abstract
Excitons in semiconductors, bound pairs of excited electrons and holes, can form the basis for new classes of quantum optoelectronic devices. A van der Waals heterostructure built from atomically thin semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) enables the formation of excitons from electrons and holes in distinct layers, producing interlayer excitons with large binding energy and a long lifetime. Employing heterostructures of monolayer TMDs, we realize optical and electrical generation of long-lived neutral and charged interlayer excitons. We demonstrate the transport of neutral interlayer excitons across the whole sample that can be controlled by excitation power and gate electrodes. We also realize the drift motion of charged interlayer excitons using Ohmic-contacted devices. The electrical generation and control of excitons provides a new route for realizing quantum manipulation of bosonic composite particles with complete electrical tunability.
Exciton binding energies of hundreds of meV and strong light absorption in the optical frequency range make transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) promising for novel optoelectronic nanodevices. In particular, atomically thin TMDs can be stacked to heterostructures enabling the design of new materials with tailored properties. The strong Coulomb interaction gives rise to interlayer excitons, where electrons and holes are spatially separated in different layers. In this work, we reveal the microscopic processes behind the formation, thermalization and decay of these fundamentally interesting and technologically relevant interlayer excitonic states. In particular, we present for the exemplary MoSe$_2$-WSe$_2$ heterostructure the interlayer exciton binding energies and wave functions as well as their time- and energy-resolved dynamics. Finally, we predict the dominant contribution of interlayer excitons to the photoluminescence of these materials.
Stacking order can significantly influence the physical properties of two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals materials. The recent isolation of atomically thin magnetic materials opens the door for control and design of magnetism via stacking order. Here we apply hydrostatic pressure up to 2 GPa to modify the stacking order in a prototype van der Waals magnetic insulator CrI3. We observe an irreversible interlayer antiferromagnetic (AF) to ferromagnetic (FM) transition in atomically thin CrI3 by magnetic circular dichroism and electron tunneling measurements. The effect is accompanied by a monoclinic to a rhombohedral stacking order change characterized by polarized Raman spectroscopy. Before the structural change, the interlayer AF coupling energy can be tuned up by nearly 100% by pressure. Our experiment reveals interlayer FM coupling, which is the established ground state in bulk CrI3, but never observed in native exfoliated thin films. The observed correlation between the magnetic ground state and the stacking order is in good agreement with first principles calculations and suggests a route towards nanoscale magnetic textures by moire engineering.
Recently, two-dimensional (2D) materials with strong in-plane anisotropic properties such as black phosphorus have demonstrated great potential for developing new devices that can take advantage of its reduced lattice symmetry with potential applications in electronics, optoelectronics and thermoelectrics. However, the selection of 2D material with strong in-plane anisotropy has so far been very limited and only sporadic studies have been devoted to transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDC) materials with reduced lattice symmetry, which is yet to convey the full picture of their optical and phonon properties, and the anisotropy in their interlayer interactions. Here, we study the anisotropic interlayer interactions in an important TMDC 2D material with reduced in-plane symmetry - atomically thin rhenium diselenide (ReSe2) - by investigating its ultralow frequency interlayer phonon vibration modes, the layer dependent optical bandgap, and the anisotropic photoluminescence (PL) spectra for the first time. The ultralow frequency interlayer Raman spectra combined with the first study of polarization-resolved high frequency Raman spectra in mono- and bi-layer ReSe2 allows deterministic identification of its layer number and crystal orientation. PL measurements show anisotropic optical emission intensity with bandgap increasing from 1.26 eV in the bulk to 1.32 eV in monolayer, consistent with the theoretical results based on first-principle calculations. The study of the layer-number dependence of the Raman modes and the PL spectra reveals the relatively weak van der Waals interaction and 2D quantum confinement in atomically-thin ReSe2.
We report ultrafast pump-probe spectroscopy examining exciton dynamics in atomically thin MoS2. Spectrally- and temporally-resolved measurements are performed to investigate the interaction dynamics of two important direct-gap excitons (A and B) and their associated broadening kinetics. The two excitons show strongly correlated inter-excitonic dynamic, in which the transient blue-shifted excitonic absorption originates from the internal A-B excitonic interaction. The observed complex spectral response is determined by the exciton collision-induced linewidth broadening; the broadening of the B exciton linewidth in turn lowers the peak spectral amplitude of the A exciton. Resonant excitation at the B exciton energy reveals that inter-excitonic scattering plays a more important role in determining the broadening kinetics than free-carrier scattering.
We present a detailed investigation of the exciton and trion dynamics in naturally doped MoSe2 and WSe2 single atomic layers as a function of temperature in the range 10-300K under above band-gap laser excitation. By combining time-integrated and time-resolved photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy we show the importance of exciton and trion localization in both materials at low temperatures. We also reveal the transition to delocalized exciton complexes at higher temperatures where the exciton and trion thermal energy exceeds the typical localization energy. This is accompanied with strong changes in PL including suppression of the trion PL and decrease of the trion PL life-time, as well as significant changes for neutral excitons in the temperature dependence of the PL intensity and appearance of a pronounced slow PL decay component. In MoSe2 and WSe2 studied here, the temperatures where such strong changes occur are observed at around 100 and 200 K, respectively, in agreement with their inhomogeneous PL linewidth of 8 and 20 meV at T~10K. The observed behavior is a result of a complex interplay between influences of the specific energy ordering of bright and dark excitons in MoSe2 and WSe2, sample doping, trion and exciton localization and various temperature-dependent non-radiative processes.