Tailoring Valley Polarization of Interlayer Excitons in van der Waals Heterostructure toward Optical Communication

Controlling the valley polarization of interlayer excitons in van der Waals heterostructures is essential for developing valleytronic devices. Here, we demonstrate the manipulation of valley polarization of interlayer excitons in a monolayer WSe2/WS2 heterostructure using a dual-handedness metasurface. This metasurface, composed of left- and right-handed gold nanoantenna arrays, exhibits distinct chiral optical responses. Introducing the metasurface into heterostructures significantly enhances the degree of interlayer exciton valley polarization, which quantitatively corresponds to the circular dichroism (CD) of interlayer excitons, via chiral Purcell effects. A negative CD of −16% is yielded via the left-handed metasurface, and a positive CD of +25% is harvested via the right-handed metasurface under σ+ excitation of 532 nm at 77 K. Moreover, the CD is tunable with excitation wavelength, reaching a maximum of 38% at 620 nm under σ– excitation, the highest value from interlayer excitons reported so far without applying external fields. Further, we demonstrate that this platform enables direct and byte-invert arithmetic operations for information transmission. This capability highlights its potential for error detection in valleytronics-based optical communication systems.