Excitons in semiconductors, bound pairs of excited electrons and holes, can form the basis for new classes of quantum optoelectronic devices. A van der Waals heterostructure built from atomically thin semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) enables the formation of excitons from electrons and holes in distinct layers, producing interlayer excitons with large binding energy and a long lifetime. Employing heterostructures of monolayer TMDs, we realize optical and electrical generation of long-lived neutral and charged interlayer excitons. We demonstrate the transport of neutral interlayer excitons across the whole sample that can be controlled by excitation power and gate electrodes. We also realize the drift motion of charged interlayer excitons using Ohmic-contacted devices. The electrical generation and control of excitons provides a new route for realizing quantum manipulation of bosonic composite particles with complete electrical tunability.
@article{arxiv.1812.08691,
title = {Electrical control of interlayer exciton dynamics in atomically thin heterostructures},
author = {Luis A. Jauregui and Andrew Y. Joe and Kateryna Pistunova and Dominik S. Wild and Alexander A. High and You Zhou and Giovanni Scuri and Kristiaan De Greve and Andrey Sushko and Che-Hang Yu and Takashi Taniguchi and Kenji Watanabe and Daniel J. Needleman and Mikhail D. Lukin and Hongkun Park and Philip Kim},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.08691},
year = {2020}
}