Charge Transfer Excitations, Pair Density Waves, and Superconductivity in Moir\'e Materials

Abstract

Transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) bilayers are a new class of tunable moir\'e systems attracting interest as quantum simulators of strongly-interacting electrons in two dimensions. In particular, recent theory predicts that the correlated insulator observed in WSe$_2$/WS$_2$ at half filling is a charge-transfer insulator similar to cuprates and, upon further hole doping, exhibits a transfer of charge from anion-like to cation-like orbitals at different locations in the moir\'e unit cell. In this work, we demonstrate that in this doped charge-transfer insulator, tightly-bound charge-2e excitations can form to lower the total electrostatic repulsion. This composite excitation, which we dub a trimer, consists of a pair of holes bound to a charge-transfer exciton. When the bandwidth of doped holes is small, trimers crystallize into insulating pair density waves at a sequence of commensurate doping levels. When the bandwidth becomes comparable to the pair binding energy, itinerant holes and charge-2e trimers interact resonantly, leading to unconventional superconductivity similar to superfluidity in an ultracold Fermi gas near Feshbach resonance. Our theory is broadly applicable to strongly-interacting charge-transfer insulators, such as WSe$_2$/WS$_2$ or TMD homobilayers under an applied electric field.