Signatures of Wigner crystal of electrons in a monolayer semiconductor

Abstract

When the Coulomb repulsion between electrons dominates over their kinetic energy, electrons in two-dimensional systems are predicted to spontaneously break continuous-translation symmetry and form a quantum crystal¹. Efforts to observe^2-12 this elusive state of matter, termed a Wigner crystal, in two-dimensional extended systems have primarily focused on conductivity measurements on electrons confined to a single Landau level at high magnetic fields. Here we use optical spectroscopy to demonstrate that electrons in a monolayer semiconductor with density lower than 3 × 10¹¹ per centimetre squared form a Wigner crystal. The combination of a high electron effective mass and reduced dielectric screening enables us to observe electronic charge order even in the absence of a moiré potential or an external magnetic field. The interactions between a resonantly injected exciton and electrons arranged in a periodic lattice modify the exciton bandstructure so that an umklapp resonance arises in the optical reflection spectrum, heralding the presence of charge order¹³. Our findings demonstrate that charge-tunable transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers¹⁴ enable the investigation of previously uncharted territory for many-body physics where interaction energy dominates over kinetic energy.