We report light emission around 1 eV (1240 nm) from heterostructures of MoS2 and WSe2 transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers. We identify its origin in an interlayer exciton (ILX) by its wide ...spectral tunability under an out-of-plane electric field. From the static dipole moment of the state, its temperature and twist-angle dependence, and comparison with electronic structure calculations, we assign this ILX to the fundamental interlayer transition between the K valleys in this system. Our findings gain access to the interlayer physics of the intrinsically incommensurate MoS2/WSe2 heterostructure, including moiré and valley pseudospin effects, and its integration with silicon photonics and optical fiber communication systems operating at wavelengths longer than 1150 nm.
We investigate the valley Hall effect (VHE) in monolayer WSe2 field-effect transistors using optical Kerr rotation measurements at 20 K. While studies of the VHE have so far focused on n-doped MoS2, ...we observe the VHE in WSe2 in both the n- and p-doping regimes. Hole doping enables access to the large spin-splitting of the valence band of this material. The Kerr rotation measurements probe the spatial distribution of the valley carrier imbalance induced by the VHE. Under current flow, we observe distinct spin-valley polarization along the edges of the transistor channel. From analysis of the magnitude of the Kerr rotation, we infer a spin-valley density of 44 spins/μm, integrated over the edge region in the p-doped regime. Assuming a spin diffusion length less than 0.1 μm, this corresponds to a spin-valley polarization of the holes exceeding 1%.
van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures provide a powerful method to control the alignment of energy bands of atomically thin 2D materials. Under light illumination, the optical responses are dominated ...by Coulomb-bound electron–hole quasiparticles, for example, excitons, trions, and biexcitons, whose contributions accordingly depend on the types of heterostructures. For type-II heterostructures, it has been well established that light excitation results in electrons and holes that are separated in different layers, and the radiative recombination is dominated by the interlayer excitons. On the contrary, little is known about the corresponding optical responses of type-I cases. Understanding the optical characteristics of type-I heterostructures is important to the full exploration of the quasiparticle physics of the 2D heterostacks. In this study, we performed optical spectroscopy on type-I vdW heterostacks composed of monolayer MoTe2 and WSe2. Photoluminescence and reflection contrast spectroscopy show that the light absorption and emission are dominated by the Coulomb-bound trions. Importantly, we observed that the MoTe2 trion emission gets stronger compared with the exciton emission under resonant light excitation to the WSe2 trion absorption state, especially in the WSe2/MoTe2/WSe2 heterotrilayer. A detailed study of photoluminescence excitation further reveals that the charge-transfer mechanism is likely responsible for our observation, which differs from the exciton-dominated dipole–dipole energy transfer in type-II structures. Our demonstration implies that the type-I vdW heterostack provides new opportunities to engineer the light–matter interactions through many-body Coulomb-bound states.
Stacking van der Waals crystals allows for the on-demand creation of a periodic potential landscape to tailor the transport of quasiparticle excitations. We investigate the diffusion of photoexcited ...electron-hole pairs, or excitons, at the interface of WS2/WSe2 van der Waals heterostructure over a wide range of temperatures. We observe the appearance of distinct interlayer excitons for parallel and antiparallel stacking and track their diffusion through spatially and temporally resolved photoluminescence spectroscopy from 30 to 250 K. While the measured exciton diffusivity decreases with temperature, it surprisingly plateaus below 90 K. Our observations cannot be explained by classical models like hopping in the moiré potential. A combination of ab initio theory and molecular dynamics simulations suggests that low-energy phonons arising from the mismatched lattices of moiré heterostructures, also known as phasons, play a key role in describing and understanding this anomalous behavior of exciton diffusion. Our observations indicate that the moiré potential landscape is dynamic down to very low temperatures and that the phason modes can enable efficient transport of energy in the form of excitons.Stacking van der Waals crystals allows for the on-demand creation of a periodic potential landscape to tailor the transport of quasiparticle excitations. We investigate the diffusion of photoexcited electron-hole pairs, or excitons, at the interface of WS2/WSe2 van der Waals heterostructure over a wide range of temperatures. We observe the appearance of distinct interlayer excitons for parallel and antiparallel stacking and track their diffusion through spatially and temporally resolved photoluminescence spectroscopy from 30 to 250 K. While the measured exciton diffusivity decreases with temperature, it surprisingly plateaus below 90 K. Our observations cannot be explained by classical models like hopping in the moiré potential. A combination of ab initio theory and molecular dynamics simulations suggests that low-energy phonons arising from the mismatched lattices of moiré heterostructures, also known as phasons, play a key role in describing and understanding this anomalous behavior of exciton diffusion. Our observations indicate that the moiré potential landscape is dynamic down to very low temperatures and that the phason modes can enable efficient transport of energy in the form of excitons.
We directly image valley-polarized excitons in a WSe 2 /MoS 2 heterostructure using time- and angle-resolved micro photoemission spectroscopy, before and after interlayer exciton formation.