Chen, HailongWen, XiewenZhang, JingWu, TianminGong, YongjiZhang, XiangYuan, JiangtanYi, ChongyueLou, JunAjayan, Pulickel M.Zhuang, WeiZhang, GuangyuZheng, Junrong2016-09-302016-09-302016Chen, Hailong, Wen, Xiewen, Zhang, Jing, et al.. "Ultrafast formation of interlayer hot excitons in atomically thin MoS2/WS2ﾠheterostructures." <i>Nature Communications,</i> 7, (2016) Springer Nature: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12512.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/91623Van der Waals heterostructures composed of two-dimensional transition-metal dichalcogenides layers have recently emerged as a new family of materials, with great potential for atomically thin opto-electronic and photovoltaic applications. It is puzzling, however, that the photocurrent is yielded so efficiently in these structures, despite the apparent momentum mismatch between the intralayer/interlayer excitons during the charge transfer, as well as the tightly bound nature of the excitons in 2D geometry. Using the energy-state-resolved ultrafast visible/infrared microspectroscopy, we herein obtain unambiguous experimental evidence of the charge transfer intermediate state with excess energy, during the transition from an intralayer exciton to an interlayer exciton at the interface of a WS2/MoS2ﾠheterostructure, and free carriers moving across the interface much faster than recombining into the intralayer excitons. The observations therefore explain how the remarkable charge transfer rate and photocurrent generation are achieved even with the aforementioned momentum mismatch and excitonic localization in 2D heterostructures and devices.engThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the articleﾒs Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material.Journal articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12512