Room temperature wavelike exciton transport in a van der Waals superatomic semiconductor

Abstract

The transport of energy and information in semiconductors is limited by scattering between electronic carriers and lattice phonons, resulting in diffusive and lossy transport that curtails all semiconductor technologies. Using Re6Se8Cl2, a van der Waals (vdW) superatomic semiconductor, we demonstrate the formation of acoustic exciton-polarons, an electronic quasiparticle shielded from phonon scattering. We directly image polaron transport in Re6Se8Cl2 at room temperature and reveal quasi-ballistic, wavelike propagation sustained for nanoseconds and several microns. Shielded polaron transport leads to electronic energy propagation orders of magnitude greater than in other vdW semiconductors, exceeding even silicon over nanoseconds. We propose that, counterintuitively, quasi-flat electronic bands and strong exciton-acoustic phonon coupling are together responsible for the remarkable transport properties of Re6Se8Cl2, establishing a new path to ballistic room-temperature semiconductors.

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Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Exciton Delocalization Suppresses Polariton Scattering
• Observation of Coherent Ferron Emission and Propagation
• Exciton transport driven by spin excitations in an antiferromagnet
• Polaron catastrophe within quantum acoustics