For quantum technologies based on single excitons and spins, the deterministic placement and control of a single exciton is a longstanding goal. MoSe 2 -WSe 2 heterostructures host spatially indirect interlayer excitons (IXs) that exhibit highly tunable energies and unique spin-valley physics, making them promising candidates for quantum information processing. Previous IX trapping approaches involving moireś uperlattices and nanopillars do not meet the quantum technology requirements of deterministic placement and energy tunability. Here, we use a nanopatterned graphene gate to create a sharply varying electric field in close proximity to a MoSe 2 -WSe 2 heterostructure. The dipole interaction between the IX and the electric field creates an ∼20 nm trap. The trapped IXs show the predicted electric-field-dependent energy, saturation at low excitation power, and increased lifetime, all signatures of strong spatial confinement. The demonstrated architecture is a crucial step toward the deterministic trapping of single IXs, which has broad applications to scalable quantum technologies.

MoSe2–WSe2 heterostructures host strongly bound interlayer excitons (IXs), which exhibit bright photoluminescence (PL) when the twist angle is near 0° or 60°. Over the past several years, there have been numerous reports on the optical response of these heterostructures but no unifying model to understand the dynamics of IXs and their temperature dependence. Here we perform a comprehensive study of the temperature, excitation power, and time-dependent PL of IXs. We observe a significant decrease in PL intensity above a transition temperature that we attribute to a transition from localized to delocalized IXs. Astoundingly, we find a simple inverse relationship between the IX PL energy and the transition temperature, which exhibits opposite power-dependent behaviors for near 0° and 60° samples. We conclude that this temperature dependence is a result of IX–IX exchange interactions, whose effect is suppressed by the moiré potential trapping IXs at low temperature.

Interlayer excitons (IXs) in MoSe2–WSe2 heterobilayers have generated interest as highly tunable light emitters in transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) heterostructures. Previous reports of spectrally narrow (<1 meV) photoluminescence (PL) emission lines at low temperature have been attributed to IXs localized by the moiré potential between the TMD layers. We show that spectrally narrow IX PL lines are present even when the moiré potential is suppressed by inserting a bilayer hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) spacer between the TMD layers. We compare the doping, electric field, magnetic field, and temperature dependence of IXs in a directly contacted MoSe2–WSe2 region to those in a region separated by bilayer hBN. The doping, electric field, and temperature dependence of the narrow IX lines are similar for both regions, but their excitonic g-factors have opposite signs, indicating that the origin of narrow IX PL is not the moiré potential.

Controlling the flow of charge neutral interlayer exciton (IX) quasiparticles can potentially lead to low loss excitonic circuits. Here, we report unidirectional transport of IXs along nanoscale electrostatically defined channels in an MoSe2–WSe2 heterostructure. These results are enabled by a lithographically defined triangular etch in a graphene gate to create a potential energy “slide”. By performing spatially and temporally resolved photoluminescence measurements, we measure smoothly varying IX energy along the structure and high speed exciton flow with a drift velocity up to 2 × 106 cm/s, an order of magnitude larger than previous experiments. Furthermore, exciton flow can be controlled by saturating exciton population in the channel using a second laser pulse, demonstrating an optically gated excitonic transistor. Our work paves the way toward low loss excitonic circuits, the study of bosonic transport in one-dimensional channels, and custom potential energy landscapes for excitons in van der Waals heterostructures.

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