Stacking tunable interlayer magnetism in bilayer CrI3

By Peiheng Jiang, Cong Wang, Dachuan Chen, Z. Zhong, Zhe Yuan, Zhong-yi Lu, W. Ji. Physical review B, 2018

270 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Diverse interlayer tunability of physical properties of two-dimensional layers mostly lies in the covalent-like quasi-bonding that is significant in electronic structures but rather weak for energetics. Such characteristics result in various stacking orders that are energetically comparable but may significantly differ in terms of electronic structures, e.g. magnetism. Inspired by several recent experiments showing interlayer anti-ferromagnetically coupled CrI3 bilayers, we carried out first-principles calculations for CrI3 bilayers. We found that the anti-ferromagnetic coupling results from a new stacking order with the C2/m space group symmetry, rather than the graphene-like one with R3 as previously believed. Moreover, we demonstrated that the intra- and inter-layer couplings in CrI3 bilayer are governed by two different mechanisms, namely ferromagnetic super-exchange and direct-exchange interactions, which are largely decoupled because of their significant difference in strength at the strong- and weak-interaction limits. This allows the much weaker interlayer magnetic coupling to be more feasibly tuned by stacking orders solely. Given the fact that interlayer magnetic properties can be altered by changing crystal structure with different stacking orders, our work opens a new paradigm for tuning interlayer magnetic properties with the freedom of stacking order in two dimensional layered materials.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/87d081385a49498fe72fa43f77711edf1de751b1

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Xiaodong Xu
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Citations in the corpus

• Magnetism, symmetry and spin transport in van der Waals layered systems (2021, unknown): “In the thin-film regime, two studies 103,113 both independently applied hydrostatic pressure of a few GPa on a few monolayer of CrI 3 and observed a monoclinic-to-rhombohedral structural transition, driven by interlayer antiferromagnetic or ferromagnetic couplings 114–117 .”
• Stacking-Dependent Magnetism in Bilayer CrI3. (2018, background): “—Recently, two related papers [47, 48] have studied the stacking-dependent magnetism in CrI3 bilayers, but only focused on the AB and AB′-stacking.”
• Probing and controlling magnetic states in 2D layered magnetic materials (2019, unknown): “…suggested that the observed layer-dependent magnetism originates from the locking of atomically thin samples in the monoclinic stacking order 29,70,85,86 , in contrast to the stacking order of the bulk material, which changes from a high-temperature monoclinic stacking to a low-temperature…”