Engineering Correlated States in MoSe₂ by a Periodic Nanopatterned Gate

Authors: Trevor G. Stanfill, Daniel N. Shanks, Takashi Taniguchi, Kenji Watanabe, Nan Huang, David G. Mandrus, Brian J. LeRoy, John R. Schaibley

Transition metal dichalcogenide semiconductors such as MoSe₂ have low defect densities and enhanced Coulomb interactions that make them excellent platforms for studying many-body physics. In recent years, they have been shown to host strongly correlated states, such as Wigner crystals and Mott insulators. Many of these works, however, have been restricted to samples measured under an external magnetic field at extreme cryogenic temperatures. I will present an alternative approach based on integrating nano-scale patterned graphene gates into an MoSe­₂ semiconductor heterostructure. This allows us to spatially tune the semiconductor’s charge configuration, such that charge order can be maintained through a precise gating scheme. By studying correlated states through gate patterning, we can freely choose a pattern geometry and size such that we can engineer a customizable potential landscape into the semiconductor. Specifically, we patterned a 2D-periodic triangular lattice with nearest-neighbor distances of 40 nm, and individual hole diameters of 12 nm. We investigated the resulting states hosted by the semiconductor through gate-dependent photoluminescence and white light reflectivity. Our results show changes to the emission and reflectivity of our sample, when exciting over the nanopatterned gate.



Funding: We acknowledge support from NSF Grant Nos. ECCS-2054572, DMR-2003583, and AFOSR Grant Nos. FA9550-20-1-0217, FA9550-22-1-0312, FA9550-22-1-0113.