Interlayer Fermi Polarons in Bilayer MoTe2
Abstract
Atomic bilayers of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) host quantum phases governed by the layer degree of freedom, including bilayer Wigner crystals, fractional Chern insulators, and exciton condensates. These phases are probed primarily through exciton spectroscopy, yet it remains poorly understood how excitons and carriers interact to form Fermi polarons in bilayers, where both the impurity and the Fermi sea carry a layer pseudospin. Progress has been limited because most TMD bilayers have momentum-indirect optical bandgaps, in which non-radiative decay and inhomogeneous broadening obscure the intrinsic spectra. Here, we show that bilayer MoTe2, unlike most TMD bilayers, retains a direct optical bandgap, providing a clean platform for studying bilayer Fermi-polaron physics. In a dual-gated device, an out-of-plane electric field continuously tunes the hybridization between intralayer and interlayer excitons, forming layer-coherent excitons. Upon electrostatic doping, the excitonic spectrum evolves into multiple polaron branches, controlled by both carrier doping and the out-of-plane electric field. Among these, we identify a polaron with no analog in monolayers, in which a layer-coherent exciton is dressed by carriers in the opposite layer, and is quantitatively captured by our field-theoretic model. Our results establish that pseudospin structure in both the impurity and the bath reshapes polaron formation, opening new avenues to many-body states such as Bose-Einstein condensates with interlayer coherence.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{ni2026interlayer,
title = {{Interlayer Fermi Polarons in Bilayer MoTe$_2$}},
author = {Ruihao Ni and Eugen Dizer and Maximilian Wolf and Son T. Le and Sharadh Jois and Jeffrey J. Schwartz and Liuxin Gu and Rundong Ma and Suji Park and Beini Gao and Lifu Zhang and Houk Jang and Takashi Taniguchi and Kenji Watanabe and Aubrey T. Hanbicki and Adam L. Friedman and Richard Schmidt and You Zhou},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.38045},
eprint = {2609.38045},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38045},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Interlayer Fermi Polarons in Bilayer MoTe_2
AU - Ruihao Ni
AU - Eugen Dizer
AU - Maximilian Wolf
AU - Son T. Le
AU - Sharadh Jois
AU - Jeffrey J. Schwartz
AU - Liuxin Gu
AU - Rundong Ma
AU - Suji Park
AU - Beini Gao
AU - Lifu Zhang
AU - Houk Jang
AU - Takashi Taniguchi
AU - Kenji Watanabe
AU - Aubrey T. Hanbicki
AU - Adam L. Friedman
AU - Richard Schmidt
AU - You Zhou
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/29
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.38045
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38045
AB - Atomic bilayers of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) host quantum phases governed by the layer degree of freedom, including bilayer Wigner crystals, fractional Chern insulators, and exciton condensates. These phases are probed primarily through exciton spectroscopy, yet it remains poorly understood how excitons and carriers interact to form Fermi polarons in bilayers, where both the impurity and the Fermi sea carry a layer pseudospin. Progress has been limited because most TMD bilayers have momentum-indirect optical bandgaps, in which non-radiative decay and inhomogeneous broadening obscure the intrinsic spectra. Here, we show that bilayer MoTe_2, unlike most TMD bilayers, retains a direct optical bandgap, providing a clean platform for studying bilayer Fermi-polaron physics. In a dual-gated device, an out-of-plane electric field continuously tunes the hybridization between intralayer and interlayer excitons, forming layer-coherent excitons. Upon electrostatic doping, the excitonic spectrum evolves into multiple polaron branches, controlled by both carrier doping and the out-of-plane electric field. Among these, we identify a polaron with no analog in monolayers, in which a layer-coherent exciton is dressed by carriers in the opposite layer, and is quantitatively captured by our field-theoretic model. Our results establish that pseudospin structure in both the impurity and the bath reshapes polaron formation, opening new avenues to many-body states such as Bose-Einstein condensates with interlayer coherence.
ER -