Orbital transfer reveals material-selective structure in Rydberg excitons
Abstract
Rydberg excitons in atomically thin semiconductors offer a sensitive view of dielectric screening and electronic structure. As their spectra become increasingly well resolved, a central question is how much material information an effective Hamiltonian can predict beyond the states used to determine it. Using the 1s, 2p and 2s levels to determine a scalar Rytova-Keldysh Hamiltonian, we test its transfer to the excluded 3p state. The transfer deviations have opposite signs: the observed 3p lies 7.38 meV below the prediction in MoSe2 and 5.58 meV above it in WS2; the opposite signs persist across the complete reported +/-2-sigma peak-error boxes. In a separate high-field-calibrated benchmark, RK removes 66.8% of the orbital error of a pure two-dimensional Coulomb reference, making the remaining state-selective deviations particularly informative. After separating gap and common-scale contributions, the residuals reveal distinct material-dependent orbital patterns and constrain simple multichannel descriptions. For WS2, the measured 2p/3p curvatures yield a parameter-fixed prediction, Q4p=+4.08 meV, for a future same-platform measurement. Together these results show how a well-performing spectral model can be tested for transferable physical information, with the next unmeasured state providing an independent experimental check.