Varied magnetic phases in a van der Waals easy-plane antiferromagnet revealed by nitrogen-vacancy center microscopy
arXiv:2204.09277 · doi:10.1021/acsnano.2c04132
Abstract
Interest in van der Waals materials often stems from a desire to miniaturise existing technologies by exploiting their intrinsic layered structure to create near atomically-thin components that do not suffer from surface defects. One appealing property is easily-switchable yet robust magnetic order, a quality only sparsely demonstrated in the case of in-plane anisotropy. In this work, we use widefield nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center magnetic imaging to measure the properties of individual flakes of CuCrPS, a multiferroic van der Waals magnet known to exhibit weak easy-plane anisotropy in the bulk. We chart the crossover between in-plane ferromagnetism in thin flakes down to the trilayer, and the bulk behaviour dominated by a low-field spin-flop transition. Further, by exploiting the directional dependence of NV center magnetometry, we are able to observe an instance of a predominantly out-of-plane ferromagetic phase near zero field, in contradiction with expectation and previous experiments on the bulk material. We attribute this to the presence of surface anisotropies arising from the sample preparation process or exposure to the ambient environment, which is expected to have more general implications for a broader class of weakly anisotropic van der Waals magnets.
24 pages, 20 figures (including supplementary information)
References in corpus (15)
- 2D materials and van der Waals heterostructures
- Probing magnetism in 2D materials at the nanoscale with single spin microscopy
- Magnetic Order and Symmetry in the 2D Semiconductor CrSBr
- Atomically Thin CrCl3: An in-Plane Layered Antiferromagnetic Insulator
- Layered Antiferromagnetism Induces Large Negative Magnetoresistance in the van der Waals Semiconductor CrSBr
- Evolution of interlayer and intralayer magnetism in three atomically thin chromium trihalides
- Intrinsic 2D-XY ferromagnetism in a van der Waals monolayer
- Electrical and Thermal Generation of Spin Currents by Magnetic Graphene
- In-plane magnetic domains and Néel-like domain walls in thin flakes of the room temperature CrTe van der Waals ferromagnet
- Improved current density and magnetisation reconstruction through vector magnetic field measurements
- Imaging domain reversal in an ultrathin van der Waals ferromagnet
- Characterization of room-temperature in-plane magnetization in thin flakes of CrTe with a single spin magnetometer
- Emergence of electric-field-tunable interfacial ferromagnetism in 2D antiferromagnet heterostructures
- Comparison of different methods of nitrogen-vacancy layer formation in diamond for widefield quantum microscopy
- An Integrated Widefield Probe for Practical Diamond Nitrogen-Vacancy Microscopy