Ultrafast non-excitonic valley Hall effect in MoS<sub>2</sub>/WTe<sub>2</sub> heterobilayers.

Lee, Jekwan; Heo, Wonhyeok; Cha, Myungjun; Watanabe, Kenji; Taniguchi, Takashi; Kim, Jehyun; Cha, Soonyoung; Kim, Dohun et al. · Nat Commun · 2021

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

The valley Hall effect (VHE) in two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) crystals is a promising approach to study the valley pseudospin. Most experiments so far have used bound electron-hole pairs (excitons) through local photoexcitation. However, the valley depolarization of such excitons is fast, so that several challenges remain to be resolved. We address this issue by exploiting a unipolar VHE using a heterobilayer made of monolayer MoS<sub>2</sub>/WTe<sub>2</sub> to exhibit a long valley-polarized lifetime due to the absence of electron-hole exchange interaction. The unipolar VHE is manifested by reduced photoluminescence at the MoS<sub>2</sub> A exciton energy. Furthermore, we provide quantitative information on the time-dependent valley Hall dynamics by performing the spatially-resolved ultrafast Kerr-rotation microscopy; we find that the valley-polarized electrons persist for more than 4 nanoseconds and the valley Hall mobility exceeds 4.49 × 10<sup>3</sup> cm<sup>2</sup>/Vs, which is orders of magnitude larger than previous reports.