Inducing room-temperature valley polarization of excitonic emission in transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers

The lowest energy states in transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) monolayers follow valley selection rules, which have attracted vast interest due to the possibility of encoding and processing of quantum information. However, these quantum states are strongly affected by temperature-dependent intervalley scattering leading to complete valley depolarization, which hampers practical applications at room temperature. Therefore, for achieving clear and robust valley polarization in TMD monolayers one needs to suppress parasitic depolarization processes, which is the central challenge in the growing field of valleytronics. Here, in electron-doping experiments on TMD monolayers, we show that strong doping levels beyond 10^13 cm^−2 can induce 61% and 37% valley contrast at room temperature in tungsten diselenide and molybdenum diselenide monolayers, respectively. Our findings demonstrate that charged excitons in TMD monolayers hold the potential for the development of efficient valleytronic devices functional at 300 K.