Lattice Vacancy Induced Energy Renormalization of Photonic Quasiparticles in Two-Dimensional Semiconductors

Coulomb interactions among dense charges and quasiparticle energy renormalization are at the center of quantum science because they significantly reshape the fundamental electronic and photonic properties of materials. While lattice vacancies are ubiquitous in solid materials, their physical effect on the Coulomb interaction among quasiparticles is normally weak and negligible. Here we show that in atomically thin semiconductors the presence of lattice vacancies emerges as an important but unexplored origin for the nontrivial renormalization of quasiparticle binding energies, due to the subtle modification of overall dielectric functions at low dimensionality. Such a renormalization effect leads to unusual reduction in the energy scales of photonic quasiparticles and red shifts of photoluminescence as the density of lattice vacancies increases. With strict configurative form factors derived, a dielectric screening model is also established for the generalized trilayer systems to capture the fine modification in the energy scales of quasiparticles and to elucidate the dielectric functions versus realistic Bohr lengths. This finding highlights the essential but commonly neglected role of lattice vacancies and deciphers the longstanding enigma of unpredictable photoluminescent line shifts in low-dimensional systems.