On the origin of magnetic anisotropy in two dimensional CrI3
By J. Lado, J. Fernández-Rossier. 2017
651 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The observation of ferromagnetic order in a monolayer of CrI3 has been recently reported, with a Curie temperature of 45 K and off-plane easy axis. Here we study the origin of magnetic anisotropy, a necessary ingredient to have magnetic order in two dimensions, combining two levels of modeling, density functional calculations and spin model Hamiltonians. We find two different contributions to the magnetic anisotropy of the material, favoring off-plane magnetization and opening a gap in the spin wave spectrum. First, ferromagnetic super-exchange across the ≃90 degree Cr–I–Cr bonds, are anisotropic, due to the spin–orbit interaction of the ligand I atoms. Second, a much smaller contribution that comes from the single ion anisotropy of the S = 3/2 Cr atom. Our results permit to establish the XXZ Hamiltonian, with a very small single ion anisotropy, as the adequate spin model for this system. Using spin wave theory we estimate the Curie temperature and we highlight the essential role played by the gap that magnetic anisotropy induces on the magnon spectrum.
Subfields: Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51ad834af3610d7c6d0f94f720da00a27badf00e
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In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
In Materials Chemistry
Citations in the corpus
- Magnetism, symmetry and spin transport in van der Waals layered systems (2021, neutral): “CrX 3 (X= I, Br and Cl) exhibits good insulating properties with a typical bandgap energy of 1.2-3.1 eV 1,25,26,50 .”
- Probing and controlling magnetic states in 2D layered magnetic materials (2019, neutral): “Values of the super-exchange integrals for specific materials are obtained from results from electronic structure calculations (from either the Hubbard-type Hamiltonian or ab initio methods) 8–12, 14, 41, 69 .”
- The Computational 2D Materials Database: high-throughput modeling and discovery of atomically thin crystals (2018, result): “85 meV per Cr atom in agreement with previous calculations [154].”