Rydberg Excitons and Trions in Monolayer MoTe$_2$

Souvik Biswas, Aurélie Champagne, Jonah B. Haber, Supavit Pokawanvit, Joeson Wong, Hamidreza Akbari, Sergiy Krylyuk, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Albert V. Davydov, Zakaria Y. Al Balushi, Diana Y. Qiu, Felipe H. da Jornada, Jeffrey B. Neaton, Harry A. Atwater

Published 2023-02-07Version 1

Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) semiconductors exhibit strong excitonic optical resonances which serve as a microscopic, non-invasive probe into their fundamental properties. Like the hydrogen atom, such excitons can exhibit an entire Rydberg series of resonances. Excitons have been extensively studied in most TMDCs (MoS$_2$, MoSe$_2$, WS$_2$ and WSe$_2$), but detailed exploration of excitonic phenomena has been lacking in the important TMDC material molybdenum ditelluride (MoTe$_2$). Here, we report an experimental investigation of excitonic luminescence properties of monolayer MoTe$_2$ to understand the excitonic Rydberg series, up to 3s. We report significant modification of emission energies with temperature (4K to 300K), quantifying the exciton-phonon coupling. Furthermore, we observe a strongly gate-tunable exciton-trion interplay for all the Rydberg states governed mainly by free-carrier screening, Pauli blocking, and band-gap renormalization in agreement with the results of first-principles GW plus Bethe-Salpeter equation approach calculations. Our results help bring monolayer MoTe$_2$ closer to its potential applications in near-infrared optoelectronics and photonic devices.