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Nonclassical Exciton Diffusion in Monolayer WSe2

Koloman Wagner1, Jonas Zipfel1,2, Roberto Rosati3, Edith Wietek1, Jonas D. Ziegler1, Samuel Brem3, Raül Perea-Causín4, Takashi Taniguchi5, Kenji Watanabe6 et al.

Mikhail M. Glazov7, Ermin Malic4,3, and Alexey Chernikov1,8,*

  • 1Department of Physics, University of Regensburg, Regensburg D-93053, Germany
  • 2Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 3Department of Physics, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Renthof 7, Marburg D-35032, Germany
  • 4Department of Physics, Chalmers University of Technology, Fysikgården 1, 41258 Gothenburg, Sweden
  • 5International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-004, Japan
  • 6Research Center for Functional Materials, National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-004, Japan
  • 7Ioffe Institute, 194021 Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation
  • 8Dresden Integrated Center for Applied Physics and Photonic Materials (IAPP) and Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat, Technische Universität Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany

  • *alexey.chernikov@tu-dresden.de

Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 076801 – Published 9 August, 2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.076801

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate time-resolved exciton propagation in a monolayer semiconductor at cryogenic temperatures. Monitoring phonon-assisted recombination of dark states, we find a highly unusual case of exciton diffusion. While at 5 K the diffusivity is intrinsically limited by acoustic phonon scattering, we observe a pronounced decrease of the diffusion coefficient with increasing temperature, far below the activation threshold of higher-energy phonon modes. This behavior corresponds neither to well-known regimes of semiclassical free-particle transport nor to the thermally activated hopping in systems with strong localization. Its origin is discussed in the framework of both microscopic numerical and semiphenomenological analytical models illustrating the observed characteristics of nonclassical propagation. Challenging the established description of mobile excitons in monolayer semiconductors, these results open up avenues to study quantum transport phenomena for excitonic quasiparticles in atomically thin van der Waals materials and their heterostructures.

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