Credit: Image courtesy of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Illustration by Ella Marushchenko and Alex Tokarev.
Electrons have distinct energy levels where the energy is minimized, similar to a ball rolling down a mountain to a valley. In the artistically enhanced depiction, a valley in the electronic structure interacts with and is controllably manipulated by circularly polarized laser light. The laser causes valleys with initially equal energies to have slightly different energies. This is the first time a laser has separated energy valleys in an atomically thin semiconductor (tungsten disulfide), which could lead to advanced electronics based on energy valley states instead of conventional electronics based on charge flows and accumulation.