Room temperature magnetic vortices in the van der Waals magnet FeGeTe
arXiv:2507.03454
Abstract
We investigate the effect of confinement on the magnetic state of a 12 nm-thick FeGeTe layer grown by molecular beam epitaxy. We use quantitative scanning NV magnetometry to locally extract the magnetization in rectangular uniformly in-plane magnetized microstructures, showing no enhancement of the Curie temperature compared to magnetization measurements performed before patterning the film, in contrast to previous results obtained on thick FeGeTe flakes. Under the application of a weak out-of-plane magnetic field, we observe the stabilization of magnetic vortices at room temperature in micrometric squares. Finally, we highlight the effect of the size of the patterned micro-discs and micro-squares on the stabilization of the vortices using experiments and micromagnetic simulations. Our work thus proposes and demonstrates a way to stabilize non-collinear textures at room temperature in a van der Waals magnets using confinement, although we also show that this approach alone is not successful to enhance the Curie temperature of FeGeTe significantly above 300 K.
7 pages, 4 figures, supplement as ancillary file