Monolayers of transition-metal dichalcogenides have shown that uniaxial strain changes both the photoluminescence emission energy and intensity. The changes are attributed to the band-structure evolution under tensile strain where both the bandgap decreases and a direct-to-indirect transition occurs. This was shown for relatively high strains, whereas this is not the case at low strain values <1% in which in this work, we observe the erratic dependency of the photoluminescence intensity at low strain values as a function of strain. We find that the dominant physical property is the dependence of the optical-dipole emission on the curvature of the substrate. We validate the behavior of the photoluminescence intensity with experimental angular emission spectroscopy (k-space imaging). These findings are supported by Finite-Difference Time-Domain simulations, in agreement with the experimental data. Our findings present the importance of choosing the right substrate for flexible devices based on transition-metal dichalcogenides.
@article{arxiv.2510.13420,
title = {Angular Emission Properties of Strained Transition-Metal Dichalcogenides},
author = {Lee Grimberg and Svyatoslav Kostyukovets and Moshe G. Harats},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.13420},
year = {2026}
}