Room-temperature tuning and probing of Fermi polarons in atomically thin semiconductors on a plasmonic metasurface

Abstract

The Fermi polaron, arising from interactions between a mobile impurity and a degenerate Fermi sea, is a many-body quasiparticle that provides a sensitive probe of strongly correlated electronic phases in atomically thin semiconductors. In doped transition-metal dichalcogenides, the attractive and repulsive polaron branches are well established in monolayers. However, extending active control and quantitative, branch-resolved probing to stacked geometries has remained elusive because spectral quenching and weak optical contrast restrict access to Fermi polaron signatures. Here, we integrate electron-doped WS$_2$ flakes from monolayer to quadrilayer with a strain-tunable plasmonic metasurface, enabling high-contrast scattering readout at room temperature through coupling between Fermi polaron resonances and surface plasmons. This platform enables quantitative extraction of polaron branch spectral weights and coupling strengths across different layer numbers. We uncover a systematic thickness dependence of the spectral-weight distribution and demonstrate continuous and fully reversible spectral-weight transfer between attractive and repulsive branches in bilayers and quadrilayers, with near-complete transfer achieved in bilayers. By identifying layer number and strain as complementary control parameters for Fermi polarons, our results establish metasurface-enabled scattering spectroscopy as a practical route to resolve and manipulate many-body resonances in stacked van der Waals semiconductors, bridging idealized monolayer polaron physics and device-relevant architectures.