Effect of Phonons on Valley Depolarization in Monolayer WSe2

Abstract

In this paper, temperature dependence of the excitonic bands in a mechanically exfoliated tungsten diselenide (WSe2) monolayer is studied using photoluminescence and circular dichroic photoluminescence (PL) in the temperature range between 8 and 300 K. The peak energies associated with the neutral exciton (A), charged exciton (trion) and localized excitons are extracted from the PL spectra revealing a trion binding energy of around 30 meV. The circular dichroic PL measured at 8 K shows about 45% valley polarisation that sharply reduces with increasing temperature to 5% at 300 K with photoexcitation energy of 1.96 eV. A detailed analysis of the emission line-width suggests that the rapid decrease of valley polarisation with the increase of temperature is caused by the strong exciton–phonon interactions which efficiently scatter the excitons into different excitonic states that are easily accessible due to the supply of excess photoexcitation energy. The emission line-width broadening with the increase of temperature indicate residual exciton dephasing lifetime < 100 fs, that correlates with the observed rapid valley depolarisation. Circular dichroic photoluminescence spectra in monolayer WSe2 and the influence of temperature on valley depolarization is shown.