Electrically tunable quantum confinement of neutral excitons

Deepankur Thureja, Atac Imamoglu (), Tomasz Smoleński, Ivan Amelio, Alexander Popert, Thibault Chervy, Xiaobo Lu, Song Liu, Katayun Barmak, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, David J. Norris, Martin Kroner and Puneet A. Murthy ()
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Deepankur Thureja: ETH Zurich
Atac Imamoglu: ETH Zurich
Tomasz Smoleński: ETH Zurich
Ivan Amelio: ETH Zurich
Alexander Popert: ETH Zurich
Thibault Chervy: ETH Zurich
Xiaobo Lu: ETH Zurich
Song Liu: Columbia University
Katayun Barmak: Columbia University
Kenji Watanabe: National Institute for Materials Science
Takashi Taniguchi: National Institute for Materials Science
David J. Norris: ETH Zurich
Martin Kroner: ETH Zurich
Puneet A. Murthy: ETH Zurich

Nature, 2022, vol. 606, issue 7913, 298-304

Abstract: Abstract Confining particles to distances below their de Broglie wavelength discretizes their motional state. This fundamental effect is observed in many physical systems, ranging from electrons confined in atoms or quantum dots1,2 to ultracold atoms trapped in optical tweezers3,4. In solid-state photonics, a long-standing goal has been to achieve fully tunable quantum confinement of optically active electron–hole pairs, known as excitons. To confine excitons, existing approaches mainly rely on material modulation5, which suffers from poor control over the energy and position of trapping potentials. This has severely impeded the engineering of large-scale quantum photonic systems. Here we demonstrate electrically controlled quantum confinement of neutral excitons in 2D semiconductors. By combining gate-defined in-plane electric fields with inherent interactions between excitons and free charges in a lateral p–i–n junction, we achieve exciton confinement below 10 nm. Quantization of excitonic motion manifests in the measured optical response as a ladder of discrete voltage-dependent states below the continuum. Furthermore, we observe that our confining potentials lead to a strong modification of the relative wave function of excitons. Our technique provides an experimental route towards creating scalable arrays of identical single-photon sources and has wide-ranging implications for realizing strongly correlated photonic phases6,7 and on-chip optical quantum information processors8,9.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04634-z

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