Coexistence of structural and magnetic phases in van der Waals magnet CrI<sub>3</sub>.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34725340.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-26342-4 and PMC identifier 8560937.
- 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
CrI<sub>3</sub> has raised as an important system to the emergent field of two-dimensional van der Waals magnetic materials. However, it is still unclear why CrI<sub>3</sub> which has a ferromagnetic rhombohedral structure in bulk, changed to anti-ferromagnetic monoclinic at thin layers. Here we show that this behaviour is due to the coexistence of both monoclinic and rhombohedral crystal phases followed by three magnetic transitions at T<sub>C1</sub> = 61 K, T<sub>C2</sub> = 50 K and T<sub>C3</sub> = 25 K. Each transition corresponds to a certain fraction of the magnetically ordered volume as well as monoclinic and rhombohedral proportion. The different phases are continuously accessed as a function of the temperature over a broad range of magnitudes. Our findings suggest that the challenge of understanding the magnetic properties of thin layers CrI<sub>3</sub> is in general a coexisting structural-phase problem mediated by the volume-wise competition between magnetic phases already present in bulk.