English

Resolving High-Energy States of Interlayer Excitons in MoSe$_2$/WSe$_2$ Heterostructures

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2026-08-03 v1 Materials Science

Abstract

High-energy states of interlayer excitons (IXs) in van der Waals heterostructures remain largely unexplored despite their importance for understanding many-body interactions and nonlinear optical phenomena. Here, we use photoluminescence excitation (PLE) spectroscopy to resolve a Rydberg-like series of excited IX states in MoSe2_2/WSe2_2 heterostructures. We observe multiple PLE resonances below the intralayer exciton energies, which we assign to the 2s-, 3s-, and 4s-like states of the IXs. These resonances are consistently observed across heterostructures with different twist angles, indicating that the high-energy state spectrum is only weakly affected by the twist angle. Wannier-exciton calculations incorporating screened Coulomb interactions reproduce the overall energy scale and qualitative trends of the measured Rydberg-like series, supporting the assignment of the observed resonances. Our findings demonstrate that PLE provides direct experimental access to the previously unexplored high-energy IX states in van der Waals heterostructures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.02040,
  title  = {Resolving High-Energy States of Interlayer Excitons in MoSe$_2$/WSe$_2$ Heterostructures},
  author = {Chirag Chandrakant Palekar and Paulo E. Faria Junior and Tobias Manthei and Maximilian Nagel and Bhabani Sankar Sahoo and Shachi Machchhar and Imad Limame and Martin Podhorský and Jaroslav Fabian and Bárbara Rosa and Stephan Reitzenstein},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.02040},
  year   = {2026}
}