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Excitonic transport driven by repulsive dipolar interaction in a van der Waals heterostructure

Nature Photonics volume 16, pages 79–85 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Dipolar bosonic gases are currently the focus of intensive research due to their interesting many-body physics in the quantum regime. Their experimental embodiments range from Rydberg atoms to GaAs double quantum wells and van der Waals heterostructures built from transition metal dichalcogenides. Although quantum gases are very dilute, mutual interactions between the particles could lead to exotic many-body phenomena such as Bose–Einstein condensation and high-temperature superfluidity. Here we report the effect of repulsive dipolar interactions on the dynamics of interlayer excitons in the dilute regime. By using spatially and temporally resolved photoluminescence imaging, we observe the dynamics of exciton transport, enabling a direct estimation of exciton mobility. The presence of interactions significantly modifies the diffusive transport of excitons, effectively acting as a source of drift force and enhancing the diffusion coefficient by one order of magnitude. Combining repulsive dipolar interactions with the electrical control of interlayer excitons opens up appealing new perspectives for excitonic devices.

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Fig. 1: Interlayer excitons in a WSe2/hBN/MoSe2 heterostructure.
Fig. 2: Expansion of an exciton cloud driven by repulsive dipolar interaction.
Fig. 3: Drift velocity and mobility of interlayer excitons.
Fig. 4: Interplay between repulsive dipolar interaction and the electrostatic potential.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge many helpful discussions with A. Delteil as well as D. Unuchek and A. Avsar. The authors acknowledge the help of Z. Benes of EPFL CMI for their help with electron beam lithography. Device preparation was carried out in part in the EPFL Centre of MicroNanotechnology (CMI). This work was financially supported by the European Research Council (grant no. 682332) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant nos. 175822, 177007 and 164015). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 785219 and 881603 (Graphene Flagship Core 2 and Core 3 phases) as well as support from the CCMX Materials Challenge grant ‘Large area growth of 2D materials for device integration’. K.W. and T.T. acknowledge support from the Elemental Strategy Initiative conducted by the MEXT, Japan (grant no. JPMXP0112101001), and JSPS KAKENHI (grant nos. 19H05790 and JP20H00354).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Electrical and Microengineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

    Zhe Sun, Alberto Ciarrocchi, Fedele Tagarelli, Juan Francisco Gonzalez Marin & Andras Kis

  2. Institute of Materials Science and Engineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

    Zhe Sun, Alberto Ciarrocchi, Fedele Tagarelli, Juan Francisco Gonzalez Marin & Andras Kis

  3. Research Center for Functional Materials, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan

    Kenji Watanabe

  4. International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan

    Takashi Taniguchi

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Contributions

Z.S. built the experimental setups, performed the optical measurements and analysed the data with input from A.K. A.K. initiated and supervised the project. A.C. fabricated the device. F.T. worked on device fabrication. J.F.G.M. contributed to the initial stages of setup development. K.W. and T.T. grew the hBN crystals. Z.S. and A.K. wrote the manuscript with input from all the authors.

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Correspondence to Zhe Sun or Andras Kis.

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Peer review information Nature Photonics thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Notes 1–13 and Figs. 1–16.

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Sun, Z., Ciarrocchi, A., Tagarelli, F. et al. Excitonic transport driven by repulsive dipolar interaction in a van der Waals heterostructure. Nat. Photon. 16, 79–85 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-021-00908-6

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