Strong Coulomb interaction in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides can facilitate nontrivial many-body effects among excitonic complexes. Many-body effects such as exciton-exciton annihilation have been widely explored in this material system. However, a similar effect for charged excitons (or trions), that is, trion-trion annihilation (TTA), is expected to be relatively suppressed due to repulsive like-charges, and it has not been hitherto observed in such layered semiconductors. By a gate-dependent tuning of the spectral overlap between the trion and the charged biexciton through an “anticrossing”-like behavior in monolayer ${\mathrm{WS}}_2$, here we present an experimental observation of an anomalous suppression of the trion emission intensity with an increase in gate voltage. The results strongly correlate with time-resolved measurements, and they are inferred as direct evidence of a nontrivial TTA resulting from nonradiative Auger recombination of a bright trion, and the corresponding energy resonantly promoting a dark trion to a charged biexciton state. The extracted Auger coefficient for the process is found to be tunable ten-fold through a gate-dependent tuning of the spectral overlap.

Close

PrevNext

View figure in article

• Biexcitons
• Trions
• Transition metal dichalcogenides
• Photoluminescence
• Time-resolved photoluminescence