Abstract
Interlayer excitons in layered materials constitute a novel platform to study many-body phenomena arising from long-range interactions between quantum particles. Long-lived excitons are required to achieve high particle densities, to mediate thermalisation, and to allow for spatially and temporally correlated phases. Additionally, the ability to confine them in periodic arrays is key to building a solid-state analogue to atoms in optical lattices. Here, we demonstrate interlayer excitons with lifetime approaching 0.2 ms in a layered-material heterostructure made from WS2 and WSe2 monolayers. We show that interlayer excitons can be localised in an array using a nano-patterned substrate. These confined excitons exhibit microsecond-lifetime, enhanced emission rate, and optical selection rules inherited from the host material. The combination of a permanent dipole, deterministic spatial confinement and long lifetime places interlayer excitons in a regime that satisfies one of the requirements for simulating quantum Ising models in optically resolvable lattices.
Highlights
Interlayer excitons in layered materials constitute a novel platform to study many-body phenomena arising from long-range interactions between quantum particles
The potential of transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) heterostructure devices to explore many-body effects is evidenced by reports of excitonic condensation[51] and Mott–Hubbard physics with charge carriers in moiré superlattices[52,53,54]
Confining interlayer excitons in an arbitrary potential energy landscape independent of the TMD lattice opens up the prospect of exploiting the long-range nature of their dipole–dipole interactions, as well as their optical accessibility to explore many-body physics, such as quantum spin Ising models
Summary
With the aim of creating long-lived excitons, we limit non-radiative decay[57], which often dominates exciton loss[51,58], by working with TMDs that have low point-defect density of 109–1010 cm−2 as estimated from X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) and Scanning
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