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Observation of interlayer excitons in trilayer type-II transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructures

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Abstract

Vertically stacked transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) heterostructures provide an opportunity to explore optoelectronic properties within the two-dimensional limit. In such structures, spatially indirect interlayer excitons (IXs) can be generated in adjacent layers because of strong Coulomb interactions. However, due to the complexity of the multilayered heterostructure (HS), the capture and study of the IXs in trilayer type-II HSs have so far remained elusive. Here, we present the observation of the IXs in trilayer type-II staggered band alignment of MoS2/MoSe2/WSe2 van der Waals (vdW) HSs by photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy. The central energy of IX is 1.33 eV, and the energy difference between the extracted double peaks is 23 meV. We confirmed the origin of IX through PL properties and calculations by the density functional theory, we also studied the dependence of the IX emission peak on laser power and temperature. Furthermore, the polarization-resolved PL spectra of HS were also investigated, and the maximum polarizability of the emission peak of WSe2 reached 11.40% at 6 K. Our findings offer opportunities for the study of new physical properties of excitons in TMD HSs and therefore are valuable for exploring the potential applications of TMDs in optoelectronic devices.

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Acknowledgment

We appreciate the support of the Hunan Province’s Key Research and Development Project (No. 2019GK2233), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61775241), the Hunan Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholar (No. 2020JJ2059), Youth Innovation Team (No. 2019012) of CSU, Hunan Province Graduate Research and Innovation Project (No. CX20190177), and the Science and Technology Innovation Basic Research Project of Shenzhen (No. JCYJ20190806144418859). Also, Y. P. L. acknowledges the support from the Central South University of the State Key Laboratory of High-Performance Complex Manufacturing Project (No. ZZYJKT2020-12). Z. W. L. thanks to the financial support from the Australian Research Council (ARC Discovery Projects, Nos. DP210103539, DP180102976, and DP130104231).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Physics and Electronics, Hunan Key Laboratory for Super-microstructure and Ultrafast Process, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, China

    Biao Wu, Haihong Zheng, Junnan Ding, Yunpeng Wang & Yanping Liu

  2. State Key Laboratory of High-Performance Complex Manufacturing, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, China

    Biao Wu, Haihong Zheng, Junnan Ding & Yanping Liu

  3. School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    Zongwen Liu

  4. Shenzhen Research Institute of Central South University, Shenzhen, 518057, China

    Yanping Liu

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  1. Biao Wu
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  2. Haihong Zheng
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Correspondence to Yanping Liu.

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Wu, B., Zheng, H., Ding, J. et al. Observation of interlayer excitons in trilayer type-II transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructures. Nano Res. 15, 9588–9594 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-022-4580-3

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