Exciton-exciton interaction in transition-metal dichalcogenide monolayers

We study theoretically the Coulomb interaction between excitons in transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) monolayers. We calculate direct and exchange interaction for both ground and excited states of excitons. The screening of the Coulomb interaction, specific to monolayer structures, leads to the unique behavior of the exciton-exciton scattering for excited states, characterized by the non-monotonic dependence of the interaction as function of the transferred momentum. We find that the nontrivial screening enables the description of TMD exciton interaction strength by approximate formula which includes exciton binding parameters. The influence of screening and dielectric environment on the exciton-exciton interaction was studied, showing qualitatively different behavior for ground state and excited states of excitons. Furthermore, we consider exciton-electron interaction, which for the excited states is governed by the dominant attractive contribution of the exchange component, which increases with the excitation number. The results provide a quantitative description of the exciton-exciton and exciton-electron scattering in transition metal dichalcogenides, and are of interest for the design of perspective nonlinear optical devices based on TMD monolayers.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

Exciton Spin Hall Effect In Arc-Shaped Strained WSe₂

Generating a pure spin current using electrons, which have degrees of freedom beyond spin, such as electric charge and valley index, presents challenges. In response, we propose a novel mechanism based on intervalley exciton dynamics in {\em arc-shaped} strained transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) to achieve the {\em exciton spin Hall effect} in an electrically insulating regime, without the need for an external electric field. The interplay between strain gradients and strain-induced pseudomagnetic fields results in a net Lorentz force on long-lived intervalley excitons in WSe$_2$, carrying non-zero spin angular momentum. This process generates an exciton-mediated pure spin Hall current, resulting in opposite-sign spin accumulations and local magnetization on the two sides of the single-layer arc-shaped TMD. We demonstrate that the magnetic field induced by spin accumulation, at approximately $\sim {\rm mT}$, can be detected using techniques such as superconducting quantum interference magnetometry or spatially-resolved magneto-optical Faraday and Kerr rotations

Room-temperature polaron-mediated polariton nonlinearity in MAPbBr3 perovskites

Systems supporting exciton-polaritons represent solid-state optical platforms with a strong built-in optical nonlinearity provided by exciton-exciton interactions. In conventional semiconductors with hydrogen-like excitons the nonlinearity rate demonstrates the inverse scaling with the binding energy. This makes excitons stable at room temperatures weakly interacting, which obviously limits the possibilities of practical applications of the corresponding materials for nonlinear photonics. We demonstrate experimentally and theoretically, that these limitations can be substantially softened in hybrid perovskites, such as MAPbBr3 due to the crucial role of the polaron effects mediating the inter-particle interactions. The resulting exciton-polaron-polaritons remain both stable and strongly interacting at room temperature, which is confirmed by large nonlinear blueshifts of lower polariton branch energy under resonant femtosecond laser pulse excitation. Our findings open novel perspectives for the management of the exciton-polariton nonlinearities in ambient conditions

Highly nonlinear trion-polaritons in a monolayer semiconductor

Highly nonlinear optical materials with strong effective photon-photon interactions are required for ultrafast and quantum optical signal processing circuitry. Here we report strong Kerr-like nonlinearities by employing efficient optical transitions of charged excitons (trions) observed in semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs). By hybridising trions in monolayer MoSe2 at low electron densities with a microcavity mode, we realise trion-polaritons exhibiting significant energy shifts at small photon fluxes due to phase space filling. We find the ratio of trion- to neutral exciton–polariton interaction strength is in the range from 10 to 100 in TMDC materials and that trion-polariton nonlinearity is comparable to that in other polariton systems. The results are in good agreement with a theory accounting for the composite nature of excitons and trions and deviation of their statistics from that of ideal bosons and fermions. Our findings open a way to scalable quantum optics applications with TMDCs

Exciton Spin Hall Effect In Arc-Shaped Strained WSe₂

Generating a pure spin current using electrons, which have degrees of freedom beyond spin, such as electric charge and valley index, presents challenges. In response, we propose a novel mechanism based on intervalley exciton dynamics in {\em arc-shaped} strained transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) to achieve the {\em exciton spin Hall effect} in an electrically insulating regime, without the need for an external electric field. The interplay between strain gradients and strain-induced pseudomagnetic fields results in a net Lorentz force on long-lived intervalley excitons in WSe$_2$, carrying non-zero spin angular momentum. This process generates an exciton-mediated pure spin Hall current, resulting in opposite-sign spin accumulations and local magnetization on the two sides of the single-layer arc-shaped TMD. We demonstrate that the magnetic field induced by spin accumulation, at approximately $\sim {\rm mT}$, can be detected using techniques such as superconducting quantum interference magnetometry or spatially-resolved magneto-optical Faraday and Kerr rotations

Attractive Coulomb interaction of two-dimensional Rydberg excitons

We analyze theoretically the Coulomb scattering processes of highly excited excitons in the direct bandgap semiconductor quantum wells. We find that contrary to the interaction of ground state excitons the electron and hole exchange interaction between excited excitons has an attractive character both for $s$- and $p$-type 2D excitons. Moreover, we show that similarly to the three-dimensional (3D) highly excited excitons, the direct interaction of 2D Rydberg excitons exhibits van der Waals type long-range interaction. The results predict the linear growth of the absolute value of exchange interaction strength with an exciton principal quantum number, and point the way towards enhancement of optical nonlinearity in 2D excitonic systems