Exciton funneling in 2D artificial potential landscapes decorated by reassembled micro-bubbles

Abstract Devices operating with excitons exhibit promising prospects for overcoming the dilemma of response time and integration in electron or/and photon based system. Strain engineering has emerged as an effective approach to modulate exciton transport and dynamics, with bubbles induced biaxial strain attracting particular attention for nanoscopic manipulation of exciton flux. However, the unintentionally produced bubbles are completely stochastic in dimensions and morphology, thereby the active and controllable bubbles formation still remain challenge, which is imperative for modulating excitonic and opt-electric performance on demand. Here, we propose the annealing-driven reassembly of micro-bubbles to create the controllable artificial potential landscapes in atomically thin semiconductor, facilitating the active manipulation of exciton flux at room temperature. Correlating micro PL mappings with strain maps calculated from AFM topography and strain modeling, demonstrates the efficient localized exciton emission and exciton funneling in spectral. The imaging of exciton transport and emission provide more intuitive evidence in spatial that excitons flow towards bubble center from excitation location driven by the conventional diffusion and strain gradient induced drift effect, supported by drift-diffusion model. These findings demonstrate the great potential to control exciton dynamics on-demand through annealing driven reassembled micro-bubbles, and lay the foundation for promising applications in high-performance sensing, energy harvesting, and quantum information processing.