English

Robust valley-polarized excitonic Mott states and doublons enabled by stacking-controlled moir\'e geometry

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2026-03-26 v1

Abstract

Atomically-thin moir\'e superlattices offer an optically accessible platform for interacting bosons, where strong onsite repulsion UxxU_{xx} suppresses double occupancy and supports excitonic Mott states at unit filling. However, moir\'e confinement also enhances phonon- and disorder-assisted relaxation, challenging the robustness of these correlated states under dissipation. Here we show that strengthening the intersite exciton repulsion VxxV_{xx} between neighboring moir\'e cells offers a distinct route to stabilizing unit-filling excitonic Mott states. In H-stacked WSe2/WS2, moir\'e confinement endows interlayer excitons with an out-of-plane dipole and a pronounced in-plane quadrupolar charge distribution. Helicity-resolved transient photoluminescence, supported by first-principles-informed modelling, reveals that this quadrupolar geometry increases VxxV_{xx} at unit filling by at least a factor of two relative to the dipolar R-stacked excitons. Despite a slight reduction in UxxU_{xx}, the enhanced VxxV_{xx} yields a long-lived, valley-polarized excitonic Mott state at unit filling that persists for ~12 ns - more than twice as long as in R-stacks - and remains robust up to ~50 K. Beyond unit filling, the same geometry supports valley-polarized doublons with fourfold longer lifetimes than in R-stacks. These results establish moir\'e-geometric control of intersite interactions as a route to stabilizing excitonic Mott states and doublons against dissipation in solids.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.24494,
  title  = {Robust valley-polarized excitonic Mott states and doublons enabled by stacking-controlled moir\'e geometry},
  author = {Hao-Tien Chu and Shou-Chien Chiu and Meng-Che Yeh and Yu-Wei Hsieh and Jia-Sian Su and Xiao-Wei Zhang and Jie-Yong Zeng and Po-Chun Huang and Si-Jie Chang and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi and Yunbo Ou and Seth Ariel Tongay and Ting Cao and Chaw-Keong Yong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.24494},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:37:36.320Z