Recent experimental progresses have demonstrated the great potential of electronic and excitonic moiré superlattices in transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) for quantum many-body simulations and quantum optics applications. Here we reveal that the moiré potential landscapes in the TMDs heterostructures have an electrostatic origin from the spontaneous charge transfer across the heterointerfaces dependent on the atomic registry. This allows engineering tunable multi-chromatic superlattices through the interference of moiré potentials from independently configurable heterointerfaces in multilayers. We show examples of bichromatic moiré potentials for valley electrons, holes, and interlayer trions in MX2/M’X’2/MX2 trilayers, which can be strain switched from multi-orbital periodic superlattices to quasi-periodic disordered landscape. The trilayer moiré also hosts two independently configurable triangular superlattices of neutral excitons with opposite electric dipoles. These findings greatly enrich the versatility and controllability of TMDs moiré as a quantum simulation platform.
As a lattice interference effect, moirésuperlattices feature a magnification effect that they respond sensitively to both the extrinsic mechanical perturbations and intrinsic atomic reconstructions. Here, using scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy, we observe that long-wavelength WS 2 superlattices are reconstructed into various moirémorphologies, ranging from regular hexagons to heavily deformed ones. We show that a dedicated interplay between the extrinsic nonuniform heterostrain and the intrinsic atomic reconstruction is responsible for this interesting moiréstructure evolution. Importantly, the interplay between these two factors also introduces a local inhomogeneous intralayer strain within a moire. Contrary to the commonly reported electronic modulation that occurred at the valence band edge due to interlayer hybridization, we find that this local intralayer strain induces a strong modulation at K point of the conduction band, reaching up to 300 meV in the heavily deformed moire. Our microscopic explorations provide valuable information in understanding the intriguing physics in TMD moireś.
We show that the anisotropic energy of a 2D antiferromagnet is greatly enhanced via stacking on a magnetic substrate layer, arising from the sublattice-dependent interlayer magnetic interaction that defines an effective anisotropic energy. Interestingly, this effective energy couples strongly with the interlayer stacking order and the magnetic order of the substrate layer, providing unique mechanical and magnetic means to control the antiferromagnetic order. These two types of control methods distinctly affect the sublattice magnetization dynamics, with a change in the ratio of sublattice precession amplitudes in the former and its chirality in the latter. In moirésuperlattices formed by a relative twist or strain between the layers, the coupling with stacking order introduces a landscape of effective anisotropic energy across the moire, which can be utilized to create nonuniform antiferromagnetic textures featuring periodically localized low-energy magnons.
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