Twisted two-dimensional semiconductors generate a moir\'e landscape that confines excitons (bound electron-hole pairs) into programmable lattices, offering routes to efficient light sources, sensing, and room-temperature information processing. However, direct real-space imaging of confined excitonic species within a moir\'e unit cell remains challenging; existing claims are inferred from spatially averaged far-field signals that are intrinsically insufficient to resolve nanometre-scale variations. Here, we imaged excitons across the moir\'e of a 2∘ twisted bilayer MoS2 with nanometre resolution using room-temperature photocurrent atomic force microscopy. We directly resolved site-selective confinement: direct and indirect excitons localize at different stacking registries of the moir\'e, with contrast governed by alignment between site-selective generation and confinement minima. A Wannier-based moir\'e-exciton model reproduces the measured energies and the moir\'e-induced localization of the exciton wavefunction. These species-specific, unit-cell-resolved measurements constrain microscopic models of moir\'e excitons, provide benchmarks for excitonic order, and establish a device-compatible route to engineering excitonic lattices in van der Waals heterostructures.
@article{arxiv.2511.20398,
title = {Real-Space Imaging of Moir\'e-Confined Excitons in Twisted Bilayer MoS$_2$},
author = {Laurens J. M. Westenberg and Lumen Eek and Jort D. Verbakel and Kevin Vonk and Stijn J. H. Borggreve and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi and Paul de Boeij and Rodrigo Arouca and Cristiane Morais Smith and Pantelis Bampoulis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.20398},
year = {2025}
}