The field of 'Valleytronics' has recently been attracting growing interest as a promising concept for the next generation electronics, because non-dissipative pure valley currents with no accompanying net charge flow can be manipulated for computational use, akin to pure spin currents 1 . Valley is a quantum number defined in an electronic system whose energy bands contain energetically degenerate but non-equivalent local minima (conduction band) or maxima (valence band) due to a certain crystal structure. Specifically, spatial inversion symmetry broken two-dimensional honeycomb lattice systems exhibiting Berry curvature is a subset of possible systems that enable optical 2-5
Two-dimensional semiconductors provide an ideal platform for exploration of linear exciton and polariton physics, primarily due to large exciton binding energy and strong light-matter coupling. These features, however, generically imply reduced exciton-exciton interactions, hindering the realization of active optical devices such as lasers or parametric oscillators. Here, we show that electrical injection of itinerant electrons into monolayer molybdenum diselenide allows us to overcome this limitation: dynamical screening of exciton-polaritons by electrons leads to the formation of new quasiparticles termed polaron-polaritons that exhibit unexpectedly strong interactions as well as optical amplification by Bose-enhanced polaron-electron scattering. To measure the nonlinear optical response, we carry out timeresolved pump-probe measurements and observe polaron-polariton interaction enhancement by a factor of 50 (0.5 μeV μm 2) as compared to exciton-polaritons. Concurrently, we measure a spectrally integrated transmission gain of the probe field of ≳2 stemming from stimulated scattering of polaron-polaritons. We show theoretically that the nonequilibrium nature of optically excited quasiparticles favors a previously unexplored interaction mechanism stemming from a phase-space filling in the screening cloud, which provides an accurate explanation of the strong repulsive interactions observed experimentally. Our findings show that itinerant electron-exciton interactions provide an invaluable tool for electronic manipulation of optical properties, demonstrate a new mechanism for dramatically enhancing polariton-polariton interactions, and pave the way for realization of nonequilibrium polariton condensates.
We report polarization-resolved resonant reflection spectroscopy of a charge-tunable atomically-thin valley semiconductor hosting tightly bound excitons coupled to a dilute system of fully spin-and valley-polarized holes in the presence of a strong magnetic field. We find that exciton-hole interactions manifest themselves in hole-density dependent, Shubnikov-de Haas-like oscillations in the energy and line broadening of the excitonic resonances. These oscillations are evidenced to be precisely correlated with the occupation of Landau levels, thus demonstrating that strong interactions between the excitons and Landau-quantized itinerant carriers enable optical investigation of quantum-Hall physics in transition metal dichalcogenides. arXiv:1812.08772v1 [cond-mat.mes-hall]
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