Electrical tuning of robust layered antiferromagnetism in MXene monolayer

Abstract

A-type antiferromagnetism, with an in-plane ferromagnetic order and the interlayer antiferromagnetic coupling, owns inborn advantages for electrical manipulations but is naturally rare in real materials except in those artificial antiferromagnetic heterostructures. Here, a robust layered antiferromagnetism with a high Néel temperature is predicted in a MXene Cr${}_2$CCl${}_2$ monolayer, which provides an ideal platform as a magnetoelectric field effect transistor. Based on first-principles calculations, we demonstrate that an electric field can induce the band splitting between spin-up and spin-down channels. Although no net magnetization is generated, the inversion symmetry between the lower Cr layer and the upper Cr layer is broken via electronic cloud distortions. Moreover, this electric field can be replaced by a proximate ferroelectric layer for nonvolatility. The magneto-optic Kerr effect can be used to detect this magnetoelectricity, even if it is a collinear antiferromagnet with zero magnetization.

References in corpus (6)

• Pseudo-potentials based first-principles approach to the magneto-optical Kerr effect: from metals to the inclusion of local fields and excitonic effects
• Inversion of ferrimagnetic magnetization by ferroelectric switching via a novel magnetoelectric coupling
• Tuning Magnetism in Layered Magnet VI${}_3$: A Theoretical Study
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• Ferroic orders in two-dimensional transition/rare-earth metal halides
• Zeeman effect in centrosymmetric antiferromagnets controlled by an electric field

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Light-induced Odd-parity Magnetism in Conventional Collinear Antiferromagnets
• Oxidation tuning of ferroic transitions in Gd${}_2$C monolayer
• Ferroelectric switchable altermagnetic-like compensated ferrimagnets with charge ordering