Dynamics of moire trion and its valley polarization in microfabricated WSe2/MoSe2 heterobilayer

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a microfabrication technique to isolate and study single moire excitons and trions in WSe2/MoSe2 heterobilayers, revealing detailed valley polarization dynamics and energy splitting.

Contribution

It introduces a focused Ga+ ion beam method to control moire potential peaks, enabling exploration of intrinsic optical properties of moire excitons and trions.

Findings

Observation of single moire exciton and trion emissions.

Identification of a ~4 meV energy splitting between bright and dark trion states.

Long valley relaxation time of approximately 700 ns for moire trions.

Abstract

The moire potential, induced by stacking two monolayer semiconductors with slightly different lattice mismatches, acts as periodic quantum confinement for optically generated excitons, resulting in spatially ordered zero-dimensional quantum systems. However, there are limitations to exploring intrinsic optical properties of moire excitons due to ensemble averaged and broadened emissions from many peaks caused by the inhomogeneity of the moire potential. In this study, we proposed a microfabrication technique based on focused Ga+ ion beams, which enables us to control the number of peaks originating from the moire potential and thus explore unknown moire optical characteristics of WSe2/MoSe2 heterobilayers. By taking advantage of this approach, we reveal emissions from a single moire exciton and charged moire exciton (trion) under electrostatic doping conditions. We show the momentum dark moire trion state above the bright trion state with a splitting energy of approximately 4 meV and clarify that the dynamics are determined by the initial trion population in the bright state. Furthermore, the degree of negative circularly polarized emissions and their valley dynamics of moire trions are dominated by a very long valley relaxation process lasting ~700 ns. Our findings on microfabricated heterobilayers could be viewed as an extension of our groundbreaking efforts in the field of quantum optics application using moire superlattices.