Creating and controlling excitons with structured light in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides

Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide materials host a plethora of quantum many-body phenomena which can be tamed with laser beams for their potential applications in quantum electronics as well as quantum computing devices. In particular, structured light with nontrivial helicity endows an additional knob with which one can selectively populate and control the valley degrees of freedom in a realm dominated by the physics of electron-hole pairs or excitons. Using an effective two-band model coupled to structured light beams, we present theoretical results on the dynamics of long-lived intervalley excitions and their interaction with phonons.