Journal Article

Long-range transport of 2D excitons with acoustic waves

Wu, Changming, Lee, Seokhyeong, Taniguchi, Takashi, Peng, Ruoming, Li, Huan, Watanabe, Kenji, Ye, Yusen, Cao, Ting, Zhu, Jiayi, Xu, Xiaodong, Ripin, Adina, Li, Mo

2022

Overview

Excitons are elementary optical excitation in semiconductors. The ability to manipulate and transport these quasiparticles would enable excitonic circuits and devices for quantum photonic technologies. Recently, interlayer excitons in 2D semiconductors have emerged as a promising candidate for engineering excitonic devices due to their long lifetime, large exciton binding energy, and gate tunability. However, the charge-neutral nature of the excitons leads to weak response to the in-plane electric field and thus inhibits transport beyond the diffusion length. Here, we demonstrate the directional transport of interlayer excitons in bilayer WSe 2 driven by the propagating potential traps induced by surface acoustic waves (SAW). We show that at 100 K, the SAW-driven excitonic transport is activated above a threshold acoustic power and reaches 20 μm, a distance at least ten times longer than the diffusion length and only limited by the device size. Temperature-dependent measurement reveals the transition from the diffusion-limited regime at low temperature to the acoustic field-driven regime at elevated temperature. Our work shows that acoustic waves are an effective, contact-free means to control exciton dynamics and transport, promising for realizing 2D materials-based excitonic devices such as exciton transistors, switches, and transducers up to room temperature. Excitons in 2D semiconductors suffer from a weak response to in-plane electric fields, inhibiting their transport beyond the diffusion length. Here, the authors demonstrate the directional, long-range transport of interlayer excitons in bilayer WSe 2 driven by the propagating potential traps induced by surface acoustic waves.

• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group UK,Nature Publishing Group,Nature Portfolio
• Subject: 140/125 / 142/126 / 147/135 / 639/301/119/1000/1018 / 639/624/399 / Acoustic propagation / Bilayers / Diffusion / Diffusion length / Electric contacts / Electric fields / Elementary excitations / Excitons / High temperature / Humanities and Social Sciences / Interlayers / Low temperature / multidisciplinary / Room temperature / Science / Science (multidisciplinary) / Semiconductors / Surface acoustic waves / Switches / Temperature dependence / Transducers / Transistors / Traps / Two dimensional materials / Wave propagation / Waves