Spin/valley pumping of resident electrons in WSe2 and WS2 monolayers.

Monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides are ideal materials to control both spin and valley degrees of freedom either electrically or optically. Nevertheless, optical excitation mostly generates excitons species with inherently short lifetime and spin/valley relaxation time. Here we demonstrate a very efficient spin/valley optical pumping of resident electrons in n-doped WSe2 and WS2 monolayers. We observe that, using a continuous wave laser and appropriate doping and excitation densities, negative trion doublet lines exhibit circular polarization of opposite sign and the photoluminescence intensity of the triplet trion is more than four times larger with circular excitation than with linear excitation. We interpret our results as a consequence of a large dynamic polarization of resident electrons using circular light.

Optical properties of excitons in two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide nanobubbles.

Strain in two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide has led to localized states with exciting optical properties, in particular, in view of designing one photon sources. The naturally formed nanobubbles when the MoS2 monolayer is deposited on an hBN substrate lead to a local reduction in the band gap due to strain developing in the nanobubble. The photogenerated particles are thus confined in the strain-induced potential. Using numerical diagonalization, we simulate the spectra of the confined exciton states, their oscillator strengths, and their radiative lifetimes. We show that a single state of the confined exciton is optically active, which suggests that the MoS2/hBN nanobubbles are a good candidate for the realization of single-photon sources. Furthermore, our calculations show that the localized exciton gains in activation energy and radiative lifetime inside the nanobubble, the latter decreasing toward the one of free excitons when the nanobubble size increases.

Electrical Initialization of Electron and Nuclear Spins in a Single Quantum Dot at Zero Magnetic Field.

The emission of circularly polarized light from a single quantum dot relies on the injection of carriers with well-defined spin polarization. Here we demonstrate single dot electroluminescence (EL) with a circular polarization degree up to 35% at zero applied magnetic field. The injection of spin-polarized electrons is achieved by combining ultrathin CoFeB electrodes on top of a spin-LED device with p-type InGaAs quantum dots in the active region. We measure an Overhauser shift of several microelectronvolts at zero magnetic field for the positively charged exciton (trion X+) EL emission, which changes sign as we reverse the injected electron spin orientation. This is a signature of dynamic polarization of the nuclear spins in the quantum dot induced by the hyperfine interaction with the electrically injected electron spin. This study paves the way for electrical control of nuclear spin polarization in a single quantum dot without any external magnetic field.

Spin-orbit engineering in transition metal dichalcogenide alloy monolayers.

Binary transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers share common properties such as a direct optical bandgap, spin-orbit splittings of hundreds of meV, light-matter interaction dominated by robust excitons and coupled spin-valley states. Here we demonstrate spin-orbit-engineering in Mo(1-x)WxSe2 alloy monolayers for optoelectronics and applications based on spin- and valley-control. We probe the impact of the tuning of the conduction band spin-orbit spin-splitting on the bright versus dark exciton population. For MoSe2 monolayers, the photoluminescence intensity decreases as a function of temperature by an order of magnitude (4-300 K), whereas for WSe2 we measure surprisingly an order of magnitude increase. The ternary material shows a trend between these two extreme behaviours. We also show a non-linear increase of the valley polarization as a function of tungsten concentration, where 40% tungsten incorporation is sufficient to achieve valley polarization as high as in binary WSe2.

Low-temperature photoluminescence study of exciton recombination in bulk GaAsBi.

The exciton recombination processes in a series of elastically strained GaAsBi epilayers are investigated by means of time-integrated and time-resolved photoluminescence at T = 10 K. The bismuth content in the samples was adjusted from 1.16% to 3.83%, as confirmed by high-resolution X-ray diffraction (HR-XRD). The results are well interpreted by carrier trapping and recombination mechanisms involving the Bi-related localized levels. Clear distinction between the localized and delocalized regime was observed in the spectral and temporal photoluminescence emission.

Controlling the polarization eigenstate of a quantum dot exciton with light.

We demonstrate optical control of the polarization eigenstates of a neutral quantum dot exciton without any external fields. By varying the excitation power of a circularly polarized laser in microphotoluminescence experiments on individual InGaAs quantum dots we control the magnitude and direction of an effective internal magnetic field created via optical pumping of nuclear spins. The adjustable nuclear magnetic field allows us to tune the linear and circular polarization degree of the neutral exciton emission. The quantum dot can thus act as a tunable light polarization converter.