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The possibility of confining interlayer excitons in interfacial moire patterns has recently gained attention as a strategy to form ordered arrays of zero-dimensional quantum emitters and topological superlattices in transition metal dichalcogenide heterostructures. Strain is expected to play an important role in the modulation of the moire potential landscape, tuning the array of quantum dot-like zero-dimensional traps into parallel stripes of one-dimensional quantum wires. Here, we present real-space imaging of unstrained zero-dimensional and strain-induced one-dimensional moire patterns along with photoluminescence measurements of the corresponding excitonic emission from WSe2/MoSe2 heterobilayers. Whereas excitons in zero-dimensional moire traps display quantum emitter-like sharp photoluminescence peaks with circular polarization, the photoluminescence emission from excitons in one-dimensional moire potentials shows linear polarization and two orders of magnitude higher intensity. These results establish strain engineering as an effective method to tailor moire potentials and their optoelectronic response on demand. The combination of piezoresponse force microscopy and optical measurements reveals the influence of strain in the formation of one-dimensional moire patterns and the resulting behaviour of interlayer excitons in van der Waals heterostructures.

We propose an experimental scheme to simulate the many-body dynamical quantum Hall effect with ultra-cold bosonic atoms in a one-dimensional optical lattice. We first show that the required model Hamiltonian of a spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain with an effective magnetic field and tunable parameters can be realized in this system. For dynamical response to ramping the external fields, the quantized plateaus emerge in the Berry curvature of the interacting atomic spin chain as a function of the effective spin-exchange interaction. The quantization of this response in the parameter space with the interaction-induced topological transition characterizes the many-body dynamical quantum Hall effect. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this phenomenon can be observed in practical cold-atom experiments with numerical simulations., 8 pages, 3 figures; accepted in Quantum Information Processing