Bosonic Mott insulator of interlayer excitons in transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructure

A panoply of unconventional electronic states is recently observed in moiré superlattices. On the other hand, similar opportunities to engineer bosonic phases remain largely unexplored. Here we report the observation of a bosonic Mott insulator in WSe₂/WS₂ moiré superlattices composed of excitons, i.e., tightly bound electron-hole pairs. Using a novel pump probe spectroscopy, we find an exciton incompressible state at exciton filling v_ex = 1 and charge neutrality, which we assign to a bosonic Mott insulator. When further varying charge density, the bosonic Mott insulator continuously transitions into an electron Mott insulator at charge filling v_e = 1, suggesting a mixed Mott insulating state in between. Our observations are well captured by a mixed Hubbard model involving both fermionic and bosonic components, from which we extract the on-site Coulomb repulsion to be 15meV and 35meV for exciton-exciton and electron-exciton interactions, respectively. Our studies establish semiconducting moiré superlattices as intriguing platforms for engineering novel bosonic phases.