Electric-field switching of two-dimensional van der Waals magnets

By Shengwei Jiang, J. Shan, K. Mak. Nature Materials, 2018

861 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Controlling magnetism by purely electrical means is a key challenge to better information technology1. A variety of material systems, including ferromagnetic (FM) metals2–4, FM semiconductors5, multiferroics6–8 and magnetoelectric (ME) materials9,10, have been explored for the electric-field control of magnetism. The recent discovery of two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals magnets11,12 has opened a new door for the electrical control of magnetism at the nanometre scale through a van der Waals heterostructure device platform13. Here we demonstrate the control of magnetism in bilayer CrI3, an antiferromagnetic (AFM) semiconductor in its ground state12, by the application of small gate voltages in field-effect devices and the detection of magnetization using magnetic circular dichroism (MCD) microscopy. The applied electric field creates an interlayer potential difference, which results in a large linear ME effect, whose sign depends on the interlayer AFM order. We also achieve a complete and reversible electrical switching between the interlayer AFM and FM states in the vicinity of the interlayer spin-flip transition. The effect originates from the electric-field dependence of the interlayer exchange bias.The application of electric fields enables reversible switching of the magnetic order of CrI3 bilayers between antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic states.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/025c654cf1f58ba471e8d4565f74acca7e0b473f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. J. Shan
2. K. Mak
3. D. Ralph
4. Wei Han
5. Xiaodong Xu
6. Xiang Zhang
7. Di Xiao
8. Axel Hoffmann

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

1. K. Mak
2. J. Shan
3. D. Ralph
4. Wei Han
5. Xiang Zhang
6. Di Xiao
7. C. Fennie

In Materials Chemistry

1. J. Shan
2. K. Mak
3. Xiaodong Xu
4. Xiang Zhang
5. Di Xiao
6. D. Ralph
7. Wei Han
8. Cheng Gong

Citations in the corpus

• Magnon Transport in Quasi-Two-Dimensional van der Waals Antiferromagnets (2019, methodology): “Because of their 2D nature, efficient electrical control of magnetism in 2D ferromagnetic materials has also been explored [3,23-26], which provides an alternative route towards high-temperature ferromagnetic semiconductors [27,28].”
• Stacking-Dependent Magnetism in Bilayer CrI3. (2018, background): “Thus, both R3̄ and C2/m phases have an ABC-stacking sequence.”