Simultaneous Strain and Gate Tunability of Moiré Heterostructure Devices

Moiré heterostructures of 2D materials have served as a platform for studying and engineering a wide variety of correlated phenomena and many body physics. The atomic thickness of two-dimensional materials and the large effective lattice constant of moiré superlattices make electrostatic gating a particularly effective way to tune carrier density and thereby explore a rich phase diagram of correlated effects. Independently, two dimensional materials exhibit unusually high elasticity and can sustain significant uniaxial strain before yielding. Uniaxial strain breaks rotational symmetry and changes interatomic spacing, altering many material properties in the process. An outstanding challenge, however, is simultaneously and independently tuning uniaxial strain and electrostatic gating in-situ at cryogenic temperatures. In this talk, I will discuss our work to leverage novel approaches for efficient strain transfer to the moiré heterostructure in gateable van der Waals devices. I will show how the ability to traverse the strain-gating phase space for a high-quality transition metal dichalcogenide moiré heterostructure enables exploration of novel features in the photoluminescence spectra and discuss their origin in the underlying optoelectronic properties of this rich material system.