Covalent 2D Cr<sub>2</sub>Te<sub>3</sub> ferromagnet
Mengying Bian, A. N. Kamenskii, Mengjiao Han, Wenjie Li, Sichen Wei, Xuezeng Tian, D. B. Eason, Fan Sun, Keke He, Haolei Hui, Fei Yao, Renat Sabirianov, F. Bird, Chunlei Yang, Jianwei Miao, Junhao Lin, S. A. Crooker, Yanglong Hou, Hao Zeng
Abstract
To broaden the scope of van der Waals 2D magnets, we report the synthesis and magnetism of covalent 2D magnetic Cr2Te3 with a thickness down to one-unit-cell. The 2D Cr2Te3 crystals exhibit robust ferromagnetism with a Curie temperature of 180 K, a large perpendicular anisotropy of 7 × 105 J m−3, and a high coercivity of ∼4.6 kG at 20 K. First principles calculations further show a transition from canted to collinear ferromagnetism, a transition from perpendicular to in-plane anisotropy, and emergent half-metallic behavior in atomically-thin Cr2Te3, suggesting its potential application for injecting carriers with high spin polarization into spintronic devices.