Terahertz radiation induced attractive-repulsive Fermi polaron conversion in transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers

We present a theoretical study of terahertz radiation-induced transitions between attractive and repulsive Fermi polaron states in monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides. Going beyond the simple few-particle trion picture, we develop a many-body description that explicitly accounts for correlations with the Fermi sea of resident charge carriers. We calculate the rate of the direct optical conversion process which has a threshold where the terahertz photon energy equals to the Fermi polaron binding energy. This process features a characteristic frequency dependence near the threshold, due to final-state electron-exciton scattering related to the trion correlation with the Fermi sea hole. Furthermore, we demonstrate that intense terahertz pulses can significantly heat the electron gas via Drude absorption enabling an additional, indirect conversion mechanism through collisions between hot electrons and polarons, which exhibits a strong exponential dependence on the electron temperature. Our results reveal the important role of many-body correlations and thermal effects in the terahertz-driven dynamics of excitonic complexes in two-dimensional semiconductors.