Electronics are getting old in physics as we find new ways to control charges, currents and all sort of excited states. In the last years, optoelectronics, spintronics, or more recently, twistronics, valleytronics or excitonics are not only discovering new physics but also proposing exciting ways to organize and command particles.

In this new paper, Daniel Vaquero, Marcos H. D. Guimarães et al. (University of Groningen) show how the polarization of light can affect the distribution of excitons in the energy landscape of crystals. In particular, they show “circular excitation selectively populates excitons in a single valley, whereas linear excitation populates both valleys, inducing a valley-dependent nonlinear photoresponse”.

This work has been featured in the cover on Nanoletters.