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

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.
Reference: arXiv:2010.08896 (2020).