Doping a Wigner-Mott insulator: Exotic charge orders in transition metal dichalcogenide moiré heterobilayers

Abstract

The moir\'e pattern induced by lattice mismatch in transition metal dichalcogenide heterobilayers causes the formation of flat bands, where interactions dominate the kinetic energy. At fractional fillings of the flat valence band, the long-range electron interactions then induce Wigner-Mott crystals. In this paper we investigate the nontrivial electronic phases appearing away from fractional fillings. Either competing phases arise that are characterized as doped Wigner-Mott charge transfer insulators, or alternatively a novel state with frozen charge order is conducting the ``electron slush.'' We propose that an extremely spatially inhomogeneous local density of states can serve as a key signature of the electron slush.