Excitons in semiconductors, bound pairs of excited electrons and holes, can form the basis for new classes of quantum optoelectronic devices. A van der Waals heterostructure built from atomically thin semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) enables the formation of excitons from electrons and holes in distinct layers, producing interlayer excitons with large binding energy and a long lifetime. Employing heterostructures of monolayer TMDs, we realize optical and electrical generation of long-lived neutral and charged interlayer excitons. We demonstrate the transport of neutral interlayer excitons across the whole sample that can be controlled by excitation power and gate electrodes. We also realize the drift motion of charged interlayer excitons using Ohmic-contacted devices. The electrical generation and control of excitons provides a new route for realizing quantum manipulation of bosonic composite particles with complete electrical tunability.As bosonic composite particles, long-lived excitons can be potentially utilized for the realization of coherent quantum many-body systems (1, 2) or as quantum information carriers (3,4). In conventional semiconductors, the exciton lifetime can be increased by constructing double quantum well (DQW) heterostructures, where spatially separated electrons and holes form interlayer excitons (IEs) across the quantum wells (5-10). Strongly bound IEs can also be formed in atomically thin DQW. By stacking two

When an optical dipole is in proximity to a metallic substrate, it can emit light into both far field photons and SPPs. Far-field emission can be measured directly via top-down optical microscopy, whereas SPP emission can be detected by converting SPPs into far-field light via engineered out-coupling structures (Fig. 1a). On a single-crystal silver film, our metal of choice due to its low loss 11 , SPPs are strongly polarized in the out-of-plane (z) direction in the visible frequency range (see Supplementary Information). Consequently, the emission rate into SPPs for an out-of-plane dipole can be as high as 30 times larger than that of an in-plane dipole (Figs. 1b-d, for details of the analysis see Supplementary Information). At the same time, far-field emission of an in-plane dipole is strongly suppressed (Figs. 1b and d) because the in-plane electric field is close to zero near the silver surface. We note that when a point dipole is close to a metal 12 , non-radiative recombination due to ohmic loss can be the dominant decay mechanism.Remarkably, for delocalized excitons in quantum wells and 2D materials, quenching of exciton luminescence by ohmic loss is significantly reduced, even when they are placed 10 nm above a silver surface ( see [ 13 ] and Supplementary Fig. 1 and discussion). Combined together, the net effect of a nearby silver surface is significantly enhanced (suppressed) emission of an out-ofplane (in-plane) dipole into SPPs (far field). (Fig. 1a). The spacing between the monolayer TMD and the silver surface is determined by the bottom hBN thickness, and can easily be controlled by varying hBN thickness. In our devices, the typical spacing is on the order of ten nanometers.Excitons are created using off-resonant 660-nm laser excitation, and the PL spectra are voltages. We normalize both FF and SPP-PL spectra using the intensity of a charged exciton peak X T because it is known to involve a purely in-plane transition dipole moment 16 . The ratio of SPP-PL intensity to the FF-PL intensity after the normalization provides a direct measure of the orientation of the transition dipole for each luminescent species: the unity ratio represents a purely in-plane dipole, while a value larger than one indicates that the transition dipole has some out-of-plane components. Based on our theoretical calculations presented in Fig. 1d and Supplementary Fig. 4, an optical transition with a purely out-of-plane transition dipole should have a normalized coupling ratio of 7 in our device geometry. The experimental results for X D yield a value of 16: this discrepancy between theory and experiment is likely due to small, yet non-negligible absorption of SPPs by charged excitons as they propagate through the WSe 2 , which increases the apparent coupling ratio of X D after normalization (see Supplementary Fig. 5). Indeed, when SPPs propagate through a minimal distance within WSe 2 ( Supplementary Fig. 6), the normalized coupling ratio determined by experiment is close to 7, in good agreement with the theoretical calc...

Monolayer MoS, among many other transition metal dichalcogenides, holds great promise for future applications in nanoelectronics and optoelectronics due to its ultrathin nature, flexibility, sizable band gap, and unique spin-valley coupled physics. However, careful study of these properties at low temperature has been hindered by an inability to achieve low-temperature Ohmic contacts to monolayer MoS, particularly at low carrier densities. In this work, we report a new contact scheme that utilizes cobalt (Co) with a monolayer of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) that has the following two functions: modifies the work function of Co and acts as a tunneling barrier. We measure a flat-band Schottky barrier of 16 meV, which makes thin tunnel barriers upon doping the channels, and thus achieve low-T contact resistance of 3 kΩ.μm at a carrier density of 5.3 × 10/cm. This further allows us to observe Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations in monolayer MoS at much lower carrier densities compared to previous work.

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Guided modes in anisotropic two-dimensional van der Waals materials are experimentally investigated and their refractive indices in visible wavelengths are extracted. Our method involves near-field scanning optical microscopy of waveguide (transverse electric) and surface plasmon polariton (transverse magnetic) modes in h-BN/SiO2/Si and Ag/h-BN stacks, respectively. We determine the dispersion of these modes and use this relationship to extract anisotropic refractive indices of h-BN flakes. In the wavelength interval 550-700 nm, the in-plane and out-of-plane refractive indices are in the range 1.98-2.12 and 1.45-2.12, respectively. Our approach of using near-field scanning optical microscopy allows for direct study of interaction between light and two-dimensional van der Waals materials and heterostructures. KEYWORDS: 2D materials, near-field scanning optical microscopy, optical constants, hexagonal boron nitride Two-dimensional (2D) materials have recently garnered significant interest due to their high electrical mobility, atomic-level flatness, and large exciton binding energies which enable versatile nanophotonics and optoelectronics applications [1-23]. However, the understanding of the interaction of visible light surface plasmon polaritons with 2D materials and more complex van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures [5-7] is still in its infancy [9, 23]. In this work, we report a nearfield scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) [25-28] study of highly crystalline hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) [21] mechanically-exfoliated flakes at visible wavelengths, demonstrating the direct observation of (i) transverse electric (TE) waveguide modes supported by h-BN on SiO2 and (ii) the interaction of transverse magnetic (TM) surface plasmon polariton (SPP) modes supported by silver (Ag) with a thin h-BN flake. From NSOM scans, we estimate the intrinsically anisotropic optical dielectric constants ( = ≠ ) of h-BN, which is an arduous task by conventionalmethods such as ellipsometry [24]. Our technique can be extended to other vdW solids and heterostructures, where we anticipate the study of guided modes coupled to 2D materials to be a useful tool in exploring rich physics of surface polaritons [9-14], plexcitons (SPPs-excitons) [29], gate-tunable [17, 30, 31], layer number dependent optical properties [13], in-plane anisotropy [15, 23], and selective circular dichroism [18, 19].