Many-body interactions can couple electronic states in one layer with collective excitations in the adjacent layer, providing a route to tailor properties of heterostructures. However, detecting and quantifying interlayer many-body interactions proved a major challenge. Here, we demonstrate that quasiparticles in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are dressed by a remote cloud of phonons in the adjacent hexagonal boron nitride slab. Using angle resolved photoemission, we identify replica bands in the TMDs which are a clear fingerprint of long-range electron-phonon interaction. We develop a modified Fr\"ohlich model that shows semi-quantitative agreement with the experimental spectral functions. Our analysis shows that remote electron-phonon coupling is a generic property of interfaces with hBN. This has implications for electron mobilities in 2D materials, for superconductivity and possibly for moir\'e correlated phases.
@article{arxiv.2604.24139,
title = {Electron-phonon coupling across the TMD/hBN van der Waals interface},
author = {G. Gatti and C. Berthod and J. Issing and M. Straub and S. Mandloi and Y. Alexanian and J. Avila and P. Dudin and T. K. Kim and M. D. Watson and C. Cacho and K. Watanabe and T. Taniguchi and W. Wang and N. Clark and R. Gorbachev and N. Ubrig and I. Gutierrez-Lezama and A. F. Morpurgo and A. Tamai and F. Baumberger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.24139},
year = {2026}
}