Highly tunable valley polarization of potential-trapped moiré excitons in WSe2/WS2 heterojunctions

Abstract

Moiré superlattices created by stacking atomic layers of transition metal dichalcogenide semiconductors have emerged as a class of fascinating artificial photonic and electronic materials. An appealing attribute of these structures is the inheritance of the valley degree of freedom from the constituent monolayers. Recent studies show evidence that the valley polarization of the moiré excitons is highly tunable. In heterojunctions of WSe2/WS2, marked improvement in valley polarization is observed by increasing optical excitation power, a behavior that is quite distinct from the monolayers, and lacks a clear understanding so far. In this work, we show that this highly tunable valley property arises from filling of the moiré superlattice, which provides an intriguing mechanism for engineering these quantum opto-valleytronic platforms. Our data further demonstrate that the long-range electron-hole exchange interaction, despite being significantly weakened in the junctions, is the dominant source of moiré exciton intervalley scattering at low population. Using magnetic field tuning, we quantitatively determine the exchange interaction strength to be 0.03 meV and 0.24 meV for 0- and 60-degrees twisted samples respectively in our experiments, about one order of magnitude weaker than that in the monolayers.