Magnetic Proximity Effects in Transition-Metal Dichalcogenides: Converting Excitons

The two-dimensional character and reduced screening in monolayer transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) lead to the ubiquitous formation of robust excitons with binding energies orders of magnitude larger than in bulk semiconductors. Focusing on neutral excitons, bound electron-hole pairs, that dominate the optical response in TMDs, it is shown that they can provide fingerprints for magnetic proximity effects in magnetic heterostructures [1]. These proximity effects cannot be described by the widely used single-particle description, but instead reveal the possibility of a conversion between optically inactive and active excitons by rotating the magnetization of the magnetic substrate. With recent breakthroughs in fabricating Mo- and W-based magnetic TMD heterostructures, this emergent optical response can be directly tested experimentally.

[1] B. Scharf, et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 127403 (2017)