Magnetic frustration in a van der Waals metal CeSiI

Abstract

The realization of magnetic frustration in a metallic van der Waals (vdW) coupled material has been sought as a promising platform to explore novel phenomena both in bulk matter and in exfoliated devices. However, a suitable material platform has been lacking so far. Here, we demonstrate that CeSiI hosts itinerant electrons coexisting with exotic magnetism. In CeSiI, the magnetic cerium atoms form a triangular bilayer structure sandwiched by van der Waals stacked iodine layers. From resistivity and magnetometry measurements, we confirm the coexistence of itinerant electrons with magnetism with dominant antiferromagnetic exchange between the strongly Ising-like Ce moments below 7 K. Neutron diffraction directly confirms magnetic order with an incommensurate propagation vector k ~ (0.28, 0, 0.19) at 1.6 K, which points to the importance of further neighbor magnetic interactions in this system. The presence of a two-step magnetic-field-induced phase transition along c axis further suggests magnetic frustration in the ground state. Our findings provide a novel material platform hosting a coexistence of itinerant electron and frustrated magnetism in a vdW system, where exotic phenomena arising from rich interplay between spin, charge and lattice in low dimension can be explored.

15 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Spin current and magneto-electric effect in non-collinear magnets
• Possible persistence of multiferroic order down to bilayer limit of van der Waals material NiI${}_2$
• A series of magnon crystals appearing under ultrahigh magnetic fields in a kagomé antiferromagnet
• Observation of Devil's Staircase in the Novel Spin Valve System SrCo${}_6$O${}_{11}$

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Nature of the unconventional heavy fermion Kondo state in monolayer CeSiI
• Probing Short-Range Correlations in the van der Waals Magnet CrSBr by Small-Angle Neutron Scattering
• Revealing Pronounced Electron-Hole Fermi Pockets in the Charge Density Wave Semimetal LaTe3
• Physical properties of the layered $f$-electron van der Waals magnet Ce${}_2$Te${}_5$
• Versatile multi-q antiferromagnetic charge order in correlated vdW metals