Interferences of electrostatic moiré potentials and bichromatic superlattices of electrons and excitons in transition metal dichalcogenides

Qingjun Tong, Mingxing Chen, Feiping Xiao, Hongyi Yu, Wang Yao

Published 2020-10-18Version 1

Recent experimental progresses have demonstrated the great potential of electronic and excitonic moir\'e superlattices in transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) for quantum many-body simulations and quantum optics applications. Here we reveal that the moir\'e 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 moir\'e potentials from independently configurable heterointerfaces in multilayers. We show examples of bichromatic moir\'e 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 moir\'e also hosts two independently configurable triangular superlattices of neutral excitons with opposite electric dipoles. These findings greatly enrich the versatility and controllability of TMDs moir\'e as a quantum simulation platform.