Valley polarization of singlet and triplet trions in a WS2 monolayer in magnetic fields.

The spectral signatures associated with different negatively charged exciton complexes (trions) in a WS2 monolayer encapsulated in hBN are analyzed from low temperature and polarization resolved reflectance contrast (RC) and photoluminescence (PL) experiments, with an applied magnetic field. Based on results obtained from the RC experiment, we show that the valley Zeeman effect affects the optical response of both the singlet and the triplet trion species through the evolution of their energy and of their relative intensity, when applying an external magnetic field. Our analysis allows us to estimate a free electron concentration of ∼1.3 × 1011 cm-2. The observed evolutions based on PL experiments on the same sample are different and can hardly be understood within the same simple frame, highlighting the complexity of relaxation processes involved in the PL response.

The optical response of monolayer, few-layer and bulk tungsten disulfide.

We present a comprehensive optical study of thin flakes of tungsten disulfide (WS2) with thickness ranging from mono- to octalayer and in the bulk limit. It is shown that the optical band-gap absorption of monolayer WS2 is governed by competing resonances arising from one neutral and two distinct negatively charged excitons whose contributions to the overall absorption of light vary as a function of temperature and carrier concentration. The photoluminescence response of monolayer WS2 is found to be largely dominated by disorder/impurity- and/or phonon-assisted recombination processes. The indirect band-gap luminescence in multilayer WS2 turns out to be a phonon-mediated process whose energy evolution with the number of layers surprisingly follows a simple model of a two-dimensional confinement. The energy position of the direct band-gap response (A and B resonances) is only weakly dependent on the layer thickness, which underlines an approximate compensation of the effect of the reduction of the exciton binding energy by the shrinkage of the apparent band gap. The A-exciton absorption-type spectra in multilayer WS2 display a non-trivial fine structure which results from the specific hybridization of the electronic states in the vicinity of the K-point of the Brillouin zone. The effects of temperature on the absorption-like and photoluminescence spectra of various WS2 layers are also quantified.