Valley dynamics probed through charged and neutral exciton emission in monolayer WSe2

Optical interband transitions in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides such as WSe2 and MoS2 are governed by chiral selection rules. This allows efficient optical initialization of an electron in a specific K valley in momentum space. Here we probe the valley dynamics in monolayer WSe2 by monitoring the emission and polarization dynamics of the well-separated neutral excitons (bound electron-hole pairs) and charged excitons (trions) in photoluminescence. The neutral exciton photoluminescence intensity decay time is about 4 ps, whereas the trion emission occurs over several tens of ps. The trion polarization dynamics shows a partial, fast initial decay within tens of ps before reaching a stable polarization of ≈20%25, for which a typical valley polarization decay time of the order of 1 ns can be inferred. © 2014 American Physical Society.

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