Van der Waals magnets based heterostructures

Layered van der Waals (vdW) magnets have attracted significant recent interests due to their novel physical properties and potential applications in spintronics. These vdW magnets may be insulators or conductors, ferromagnets and/or antiferromagnets, and may even host other exotic magnetic states such as spin liquids. As transferrable layered 2D materials, they can be easily interfaced with other materials to form hybrids and heterostructures. This talk will present some recent efforts along these lines, where we have fabricated various hybrids and heterostructures interfacing vdW/2D magnets with other (both vdW and non-vdW) materials and characterized them with optical (such as MOKE and Raman) and transport measurements. For example, interfacing ferromagnetic (FM) CrGeTe3 (CGT) layers with NiO (a common antiferromagnetic oxide) leads to significantly enhanced FM Curie temperature (from ~60K to ~120K) and coercive field in CGT, suggesting enhanced magnetic anisotropy. Further studies suggest that wrinkle formation and strains play important roles in the enhanced magnetism. We also interfaced 2D magnets with strongly spin-orbit-coupled materials (including topological insulators and spin-Hall heavy metals) and studied various proximity induced transport phenomena to probe/engineer relevant spintronic order. Interfacing and heterostructuring open many possibilities to modify and probe the magnetism, as well as using the magnetism in these vdW magnets to influence and induce additional electronic/magnetic phenomena in other materials and in the hybrids.