Bilayer WSe₂ as a natural platform for interlayer exciton condensates in the strong coupling limit

Exciton condensates (ECs) are macroscopic coherent states arising from condensation of electron–hole pairs¹. Bilayer heterostructures, consisting of two-dimensional electron and hole layers separated by a tunnel barrier, provide a versatile platform to realize and study ECs^2–4. The tunnel barrier suppresses recombination, yielding long-lived excitons^5–10. However, this separation also reduces interlayer Coulomb interactions, limiting the exciton binding strength. Here, we report the observation of ECs in naturally occurring 2H-stacked bilayer WSe₂. In this system, the intrinsic spin–valley structure suppresses interlayer tunnelling even when the separation is reduced to the atomic limit, providing access to a previously unattainable regime of strong interlayer coupling. Using capacitance spectroscopy, we investigate magneto-ECs, formed when partially filled Landau levels couple between the layers. We find that the strong-coupling ECs show dramatically different behaviour compared with previous reports, including an unanticipated variation of EC robustness with the orbital number, and find evidence for a transition between two types of low-energy charged excitations. Our results provide a demonstration of tuning EC properties by varying the constituent single-particle wavefunctions.