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Updated: Nov 19, 2025

Electric-field Control of Electronic States in WS2 Nanodevices by Electrolyte Gating
Published on: April 12, 2018
Excitonic density wave and spin-valley superfluid in bilayer transition metal dichalcogenide
1Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. zjb5184@psu.edu.
Abstract:
Artificial moiré superlattices in 2d van der Waals heterostructures are a new venue for realizing and controlling correlated electronic phenomena. Recently, twisted bilayer WSe2 emerged as a new robust moiré system hosting a correlated insulator at moiré half-filling over a range of twist angle. In this work, we present a theory of this insulating state as an excitonic density wave due to intervalley electron-hole pairing. We show that exciton condensation is strongly enhanced by a van Hove singularity near the Fermi level. Our theory explains the remarkable sensitivity of the insulating gap to the vertical electric field. In contrast, the gap is weakly reduced by a perpendicular magnetic field, with quadratic dependence at low field. The different responses to electric and magnetic field can be understood in terms of pair-breaking versus non-pair-breaking effects in a BCS analog of the system. We further predict superfluid spin transport in this electrical insulator, which can be detected by optical spin injection and spatial-temporal imaging.
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