Exploring the effect of dielectric screening on neutral and charged-exciton properties in monolayer and bilayer MoTe₂

Dielectric engineering of heterostructures made from two-dimensional van der Waals semiconductors is a unique and powerful tool to tailor the electric and optical band gaps solely via the dielectric environment and the crystal thickness modulation. Here, we utilize high quality MoTe2 monolayer and bilayer crystals as a candidate for near-infrared photonic applications. The crystals are exfoliated on various technologically relevant carrier substrates: silicon/silicon dioxide, poly(methyl methacrylate), hexagonal boron nitride, silicon carbide, and silicon nitride. These substrates provide a large range of high frequency dielectric constants from 2.1 to 7.0 for MoTe2-containing heterostructures. We assess the relationship between the environmental dielectric function and Coulomb screening by combining detailed spectroscopic measurements, utilizing low-temperature and high-spatially resolved photoluminescence and contrast reflectivity, with microscopic many-body modeling, to explore the potential of this less-recognized material platform for applications in optoelectronics at photon wavelengths above 1 μm. We observe a redshift of the optical gap emission energy from the monolayer to bilayer regime on the order of 30 meV. Furthermore, the thickness controlled shift is slightly larger than the one induced by the local dielectric environment, which ranges on the order of 20 meV for the MoTe2 monolayers and on the order of 8 meV for the MoTe2 bilayers. We also show that the local dielectric screening barely affects the trion binding energy, which is captured by our microscopic model, accounting for the screened Coulomb potential for the heterostructures.