Electrical tuning of moiré excitons in MoSe₂ bilayers

Abstract Recent advances in the field of vertically stacked 2D materials have revealed a rich exciton landscape. In particular, it has been demonstrated that out-of-plane electrical fields can be used to tune the spectral position of spatially separated interlayer excitons. Other studies have shown that there is a strong hybridization of exciton states, resulting from the mixing of electronic states in both layers. However, the connection between the twist-angle dependent hybridization and field-induced energy shifts has remained in the dark. Here, we investigate on a microscopic footing the interplay of electrical and twist-angle tuning of moiré excitons in MoSe₂ homobilayers. We reveal distinct energy regions in PL spectra that are clearly dominated by either intralayer or interlayer excitons, or even dark excitons. Consequently, we predict twist-angle-dependent critical electrical fields at which the material is being transformed from a direct into an indirect semiconductor. Our work provides new microscopic insights into experimentally accessible knobs to significantly tune the moiré exciton physics in atomically thin nanomaterials.