Confinement of long-lived interlayer excitons in WS₂/WSe₂ heterostructures

Interlayer excitons in layered materials constitute a novel platform to study many-body phenomena arising from long-range interactions between quantum particles. The ability to localise individual interlayer excitons in potential energy traps is a key step towards simulating Hubbard physics in artificial lattices. Here, we demonstrate spatial localisation of long-lived interlayer excitons in a strongly confining trap array using a WS$_{2}$/WSe$_{2}$ heterostructure on a nanopatterned substrate. We detect long-lived interlayer excitons with lifetime approaching 0.2 ms and show that their confinement results in a reduced lifetime in the microsecond range and stronger emission rate with sustained optical selection rules. The combination of a permanent dipole moment, spatial confinement and long lifetime places interlayer excitons in a regime that satisfies one of the requirements for observing long-range dynamics in an optically resolvable trap lattice.