Photoexcitation of moiré-trapped interlayer excitons via chiral phonons (opens in new tab)

Moiré superlattices in transition-metal dichalcogenide semiconductor heterobilayers enable the quantum confinement of interlayer excitons with large out-of-plane permanent electric dipoles and spin-valley control. Here, we report a novel phonon-assisted excitation mechanism of individual moiré-trapped interlayer excitons in 2H-stacked MoSe2/WSe2 heterobilayers via chiral E″ in-plane optical phonons at the Γ-point. This excitation pathway preserves valley-selective optical selection rules and ...