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arXiv · 2310.18328

Exciton-exciton interactions in van der Waals heterobilayers

Abstract

Exciton-exciton interactions are key to understanding non-linear optical and transport phenomena in van der Waals heterobilayers, which emerged as versatile platforms to study correlated electronic states. We present a combined theory-experiment study of excitonic many-body effects based on first-principle band structures and Coulomb interaction matrix elements. Key to our approach is the explicit treatment of the fermionic substructure of excitons and dynamical screening effects for density-induced energy renormalization and dissipation. We demonstrate that dipolar blue shifts are almost perfectly compensated by many-body effects, mainly by screening-induced self-energy corrections. Moreover, we identify a crossover between attractive and repulsive behavior at elevated exciton densities. Theoretical findings are supported by experimental studies of spectrally-narrow interlayer excitons in atomically-reconstructed, hBN-encapsulated MoSe$_2$/WSe$_2$ heterobilayers. Both theory and experiment show energy renormalization on a scale of a few meV even for high injection densities in the vicinity of the Mott transition. Our results revise the established picture of dipolar repulsion dominating exciton-exciton interactions in van der Waals heterostructures and open up opportunities for their external design.

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Alexander Steinhoff, Edith Wietek, Matthias Florian, Tommy Schulz, Takashi Taniguchi, Kenji Watanabe, Shen Zhao, Alexander Högele, Frank Jahnke, Alexey Chernikov. 2023-10-19. Exciton-exciton interactions in van der Waals heterobilayers. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevx.14.031025

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