Excitonic linewidth and coherence lifetime in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides

Monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides are direct gap semiconductors, which have attracted much attention in the recent past. Due to a strong Coulomb interaction, they possess strongly bound electron-hole pairs, with binding energies of hundreds of meV which is an order of magnitude larger than in conventional materials. Here, we investigate the microscopic origin of the homogeneous linewidth and coherence lifetime of excitonic resonances in monolayer molybdenum disulfide, taking exciton phonon scattering and radiative recombination into account. We find a superlinear increasing homogeneous linewidth from 2 meV at 5K to 14 meV at room temperature corresponding to a coherence lifetime of 160 fs and 25 fs.