Twist versus heterostrain control of optical properties of moiré exciton minibands

Abstract

We investigate the optical properties of interlayer excitons in heterobilayer transition metal dichalcogenides where moiré pattern is introduced by heterostrain, in comparison with that introduced by twisting (and/or lattice mismatch). Besides being a cause of the moiré texture, strain also effectively introduces a constant gauge potential on either electron or hole, which shifts the dispersion of kinetic energy with respect to the excitonic crystal momenta in the moiré superlattices. This leads to distinct exciton mini-band dispersions and light coupling properties from the twisting induced moiré, even if the excitonic moiré superlattice potentials have the similar real-space profile for the two cases. For strain that breaks the three-fold rotational symmetry at the atomic scale, the exciton wave packets trapped at the superlattice potential minima have elliptically polarized valley optical selection rules, in contrast to the circularly polarized ones in the twisting moiré. We investigate the evolution of the excitonic mini-bands and the optical dipoles of the bright states inside the light cones with the decrease of the moiré periodicity, upon which the excitonic wave functions evolve from localized wave packets to the extended Bloch states. Furthermore, moiré exciton properties under the interplay of twisting and heterostrain are also discussed.