Nanowerk December 14, 2021
An international team of researchers (Germany, USA – Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Sweden, Japan) has visualized the rapid movement of excitons in atomically thin semiconductors using highly sensitive optical microscopy. First, they applied a short laser pulse to the material and then used an ultrafast detector to observe when and where the light was reemitted. They found the excitons to move in opposite directions at the same time. The only possible explanation was that the excitons would occasionally move through closed loops in opposite directions at the same time. Such behavior was in fact known from individual electrons. This effect is a purely quantum mechanical phenomenon. These results open avenues to study quantum transport phenomena for excitonic quasiparticles in atomically thin van der Waals materials and their heterostructures…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Transient mean squared displacement of the spatial exciton distribution for temperatures between 5 and 50 K. Data are vertically offset for clarity… Credit: Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 076801, 9 August 2021Â