Twisted-light-revealed Lightlike Exciton Dispersion in Monolayer MoS2

TL;DR

This study demonstrates the transfer of orbital angular momentum from twisted light to valley excitons in monolayer MoS2, revealing an unusual lightlike exciton dispersion through photoluminescence spectroscopy.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental evidence of lightlike exciton dispersion in ML-MoS2 by using twisted light to transfer OAM to valley excitons.

Findings

OAM transfer from twisted light to valley excitons in ML-MoS2.

Observation of non-linear spectral blue shifts with increasing OAM.

Experimental confirmation of lightlike exciton dispersion predicted by theory.

Abstract

Twisted light carries a well-defined orbital angular momentum (OAM) per photon. The quantum number l of its OAM can be arbitrarily set, making it an excellent light source to realize high-dimensional quantum entanglement and ultra-wide bandwidth optical communication structures. To develop solid-state optoelectronic systems compatible with such promising light sources, a timely challenging task is to efficiently and coherently transfer the optical OAM of light to certain solid-state optoelectronic materials. Among the state-of-the-art emergent materials, atomically thin monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide (ML-TMD), featured by ultra-strong light-matter interaction due to its reduced dimensionality, renders itself a potential material suitable for novel applications. In this study, we carried out photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy studies of ML-MoS2 under photoexcitation of twisted light with well-defined quantized OAM. We mainly observed pronounced increases in the spectral peak energy for every increment of l of the incident twisted light. The observed non-linear l-dependence of the spectral blue shifts evidences the OAM transfer from the exciting twisted light to the valley excitons in ML-TMDs, which is well accounted for by our analysis and computational simulation. Even more excitingly, the twisted light excitation is shown to make excitonic transitions relative to the transferred OAM, enabling us to infer the exciton band dispersion from the measured spectral shifts. Consequently, the measured non-linear l-dependent spectral shifts revealed an unusual lightlike exciton band dispersion of valley excitons in ML-TMDs that is predicted by previous theoretical studies and evidenced for the first time via our experimental setup that utilizes the unique twisted light source.