Magnetoluminescence and valley polarized state of a two-dimensional electron gas in WS2 monolayers

Materials often exhibit fundamentally new phenomena in reduced dimensions that potentially lead to novel applications. This is true for single-layer, two-dimensional semiconductor crystals of transition-metal dichalcogenides, MX2 (M = Mo, W and X = S, Se). They exhibit direct bandgaps with energies in the visible region at the two non-equivalent valleys in the Brillouin zone. This makes them suitable for optoelectronic applications that range from light-emitting diodes to light harvesting and light sensors, and to valleytronics. Here, we report the results of a magnetoluminescence study of WS2 single-layer crystals in which the strong spin-orbit interaction additionally locks the valley and spin degrees of freedom. The recombination of the negatively charged exciton in the presence of a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) is found to be circularly polarized at zero magnetic field despite being excited with unpolarized light, which indicates that the existence of a valley polarized 2DEG is caused by valley and spin locking and strong electron-electron interactions.