Long-Lived Direct and Indirect Interlayer Excitons in van der Waals Heterostructures

We report the observation of a doublet structure in the low-temperature photoluminescence of interlayer excitons in heterostructures consisting of monolayer MoSe₂ and WSe₂. Both peaks exhibit long photoluminescence lifetimes of several tens of nanoseconds up to 100 ns verifying the interlayer nature of the excitons. The energy and line width of both peaks show unusual temperature and power dependences. While the low-energy peak dominates the spectra at low power and low temperatures, the high-energy peak dominates for high power and temperature. We explain the findings by two kinds of interlayer excitons being either indirect or quasi-direct in reciprocal space. Our results provide fundamental insights into long-lived interlayer states in van der Waals heterostructures with possible bosonic many-body interactions.