Microscopic origin of anomalous interlayer exciton transport in van der Waals heterostructures

Van der Waals heterostructures constitute a platform for investigating intriguing many-body quantum phenomena. In particular, transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMD) heterobilayers host long-lived interlayer excitons which exhibit permanent out-of-plane dipole moments. Here, we develop a microscopic theory for interlayer exciton-exciton interactions including both the dipolar nature of interlayer excitons as well as their fermionic substructure, which gives rise to an attractive fermionic exchange. We find that these interactions contribute to a drift force resulting in highly nonlinear exciton propagation at elevated densities in the MoSe2 - WSe2 heterostructure. We show that the propagation can be tuned by changing the number of hBN spacers between the TMD layers or by adjusting the dielectric environment. In particular, although counterintuitive, we reveal that interlayer excitons in freestanding samples propagate slower than excitons in hBN-encapsulated TMDs-due to an enhancement of the net Coulomb drift with stronger environmental screening. Overall, our work contributes to a better microscopic understanding of the interlayer exciton transport in technologically promising atomically thin semiconductors.