Wafer‐Scale Epitaxial Growth of the Thickness‐Controllable Van Der Waals Ferromagnet CrTe<sub>2</sub> for Reliable Magnetic Memory Applications
Xinqi Liu, Puyang Huang, Yunyouyou Xia, Lei Gao, Liyang Liao, Baoshan Cui, D. Backes, G. van der Laan, T. Hesjedal, Yuchen Ji, Peng Chen, Yifan Zhang, Fan Wu, Meixiao Wang, Junwei Zhang, Guoqiang Yu, Cheng Song, Yulin Chen, Zhongkai Liu, Yumeng Yang, Yong Peng, Gang Li, Qi Yao, Xufeng Kou
Abstract
Abstract To harness the intriguing properties of 2D van der Waals (vdW) ferromagnets (FMs) for versatile applications, the key challenge lies in the reliable material synthesis for scalable device production. Here, the epitaxial growth of single‐crystalline 1 T ‐CrTe 2 thin films on 2‐inch sapphire substrates are demonstrated. Benefiting from the uniform surface energy of the dangling bond‐free Al 2 O 3 (0001) surface, the layer‐by‐layer vdW growth mode is observed right from the initial growth stage, which warrants precise control of the sample thickness beyond three monolayer and homogeneous surface morphology across the entire wafer. Moreover, the presence of the Coulomb interaction at the CrTe 2 /Al 2 O 3 interface plays an important role in tailoring the anomalous Hall response, and the structural optimization of the CrTe 2 ‐based spin‐orbit torque device leads to a substantial switching power reduction by 54%. The results may lay out a general framework for the design of energy‐efficient spintronics based on configurable vdW FMs.