Research News

Van der Waals (vdW) magnets and their heterostructures have emerged as new platforms to explore exotic magnetic orders and quantum phenomena.

Yet combining two different magnetic orders and investigating the magnetic proximity at the interface remains largely unexplored. Doing so could enable the modulation of magnetic interactions and establish exotic magnetic phases and properties.

Now, an international team of researchers from Japan, USA, Denmark, and China, has studied the heterostructures of layered antiferromagnets, CrI₃ and CrCl₃, with perpendicular and in-plane magnetic anisotropy, respectively, and reported their findings in the journal Nature Communications on December 15, 2022.

The team was led by Professor Yong P. Chen, a principal investigator at Tohoku University's Advanced Institute for Materials Research (WPI-AIMR). Chen is also a professor at Purdue University and Aarhus University in Denmark. Dr. Guanghui Cheng, an assistant professor at WPI-AIMR who worked in the Chen Laboratory, performed the experiments for the study.

Chen and his team employed magneto-optical Kerr effect microscopy to characterize the magnetic behaviors down to a few atomic layers.

"Remarkably, we observed an emergent interfacial ferromagnetism when bringing these two antiferromagnets together, with an even higher critical temperature than both the constituent materials," said Chen.

The group demonstrated that an out-of-plane magnetic order is established in the CrCl₃ layer proximal to CrI₃. The interfacial magnetism showed significantly enhanced electric-field tunability, in sharp contrast to the previously studied gate-tunable vdW magnet device (such as doping-dominated control in bilayer CrI₃). The novel tunability is attributed to the naturally broken structural inversion symmetry of the heterostructure, allowing unprecedented direct spin-charge coupling.

"These findings point to exciting opportunities to explore exotic magnetic phases and engineer novel spintronic devices in vdW heterostructures," added Chen.

Publication Details:

Title: Emergence of electric-field-tunable interfacial ferromagnetism in 2D antiferromagnet heterostructures
Authors: Guanghui Cheng, Mohammad Mushfiqur Rahman, Zhiping He, Andres Llacsahuanga Allcca, Avinash Rustagi, Kirstine Aggerbeck Stampe, Yanglin Zhu, Shaohua Yan, Shangjie Tian, Zhiqiang Mao, Hechang Lei, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Pramey Upadhyaya, Yong P. Chen
Journal: Nature Communications
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34812-6