Perturbative approach to the polaron shift of excitons in transition metal dichalcogenides

Abstract

In this Letter, we study the effect of phonons on the position of the 1s excitonic resonance of the fundamental absorption transition line in two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides. We apply our theory to WS2, a two-dimensional material where the shift in the absorption peak position has been measured as a function of temperature. The theory is composed of two ingredients only: (i) the effect of longitudinal optical phonons on the absorption peak position, which we describe with second-order perturbation theory, and (ii) the effect of phonons on the value of the single-particle energy gap, which we describe with the Huang Rhys model. Our results show excellent agreement with the experimentally measured shift of the absorption peak with the temperature.