Suppression of magnetic ordering in XXZ-type antiferromagnetic monolayer NiPS<sub>3</sub>.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 30664705.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-018-08284-6 and PMC identifier 6341093.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
How a certain ground state of complex physical systems emerges, especially in two-dimensional materials, is a fundamental question in condensed-matter physics. A particularly interesting case is systems belonging to the class of XY Hamiltonian where the magnetic order parameter of conventional nature is unstable in two-dimensional materials leading to a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition. Here, we report how the XXZ-type antiferromagnetic order of a magnetic van der Waals material, NiPS<sub>3</sub>, behaves upon reducing the thickness and ultimately becomes unstable in the monolayer limit. Our experimental data are consistent with the findings based on renormalization-group theory that at low temperatures a two-dimensional XXZ system behaves like a two-dimensional XY one, which cannot have a long-range order at finite temperatures. This work provides the experimental examination of the XY magnetism in the atomically thin limit and opens opportunities of exploiting these fundamental theorems of magnetism using magnetic van der Waals materials.