Publication date: 21st July 2025
Semiconducting perovskites hold great promise for demanding applications involving light emission, such as scintillators or lasers. Within this family of materials, fully inorganic two-dimensional (2D) CsPbBr3 perovskite quantum wells sustain stable and bright 2D excitons, yet little is known on the nature of these excitons, and possible multi-exciton complexes thereof, which dictate the spontaneous and, hereto unexplored, stimulated emission processes. Here, we first show that at low density charge carriers exist as strongly localized exciton-polarons (Xp), complexes between a charge neutral exciton and lattice phonons. Next, we show that at increasing density these Xp fuse together to form a stable bi-exciton polaron, or bipolaron in short, X2P with singlet character. X2P’s are again subject to strong localization, which leads to an observable, but weak, net stimulated emission across the X2 →XP recombination pathway. Our results provide a general framework to understand the energetics and interactions of both single and multi-polaron states in 2D perovskite materials and their ensuing (radiative) recombination pathways, which is key in developing future opto-electronic applications of these intriguing class of 2D materials.