Interlayer excitons, or bound electron-hole pairs whose constituent quasiparticles are located in distinct stacked semiconducting layers, are being intensively studied in heterobilayers of two dimensional semiconductors. They owe their existence to an intrinsic type-II band alignment between both layers that convert these into p-n junctions. Here, we unveil a pronounced interlayer exciton (IX) in heterobilayers of metal monochalcogenides, namely gamma-InSe on epsilon-GaSe, whose pronounced emission is adjustable just by varying their thicknesses given their number of layers dependent direct bandgaps. Time-dependent photoluminescense spectroscopy unveils considerably longer interlayer exciton lifetimes with respect to intralayer ones, thus confirming their nature. The linear Stark effect yields a bound electron-hole pair whose separation d is just (3.6 \pm 0.1) {\AA} with d being very close to dSe = 3.4 {\AA} which is the calculated interfacial Se separation. The envelope of IX is twist angle dependent and describable by superimposed emissions that are nearly equally spaced in energy, as if quantized due to localization induced by the small moir\'e periodicity. These heterostacks are characterized by extremely flat interfacial valence bands making them prime candidates for the observation of magnetism or other correlated electronic phases upon carrier doping.
@article{arxiv.2210.08296,
title = {Thickness and twist angle dependent interlayer excitons in metal monochalcogenide heterostructures},
author = {Wenkai Zheng and Li Xiang and Felipe de Quesada and Mathias Augustin and Zhengguang Lu and Matthew Wilson and Aditya Sood and Fengcheng Wu and Dmitry Shcherbakov and Shahriar Memaran and Ryan E. Baumbach and Gregory T. McCandless and Julia Y. Chan and Song Liu and James Edgar and Chun Ning Lau and Chun Hung Lui and Elton Santos and Aaron Lindenberg and Dmitry Smirnov and Luis Balicas},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.08296},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
ACS Nano, in press 42 pages plus, 4 figures, plus supplementary information file, containing 21 supplementary figures