Low-Power Optical Control of Two-Dimensional Magnets

A magnetic material, while dressed with different spin configurations, can host a variety of emergent phenomena such as chiral domain walls, skyrmions, and Majorana fermions. Traditional preparation of various spin textures in magnetic films by transforming an already established spin pattern demands intensive energy to cause spin flipping or domain wall motion. In contrast, engineering the phase transition kinetics potentially opens up new avenues to achieve desired spin configurations. The two-dimensional (2D) layered magnets, owing to the ultra-thinness, allow the magnetism control by various external stimuli, among which optical approaches promise non-destructive manipulation, both locally and globally. In this talk, I will introduce how we demonstrated a low-power optical control of 2D magnets. By perturbing the phase transition kinetics, we found that optically excited electrons are multiple orders of magnitudes more effective than electrostatically doped electrons in influencing magnetic domains. Our low-power optical operation paves the new avenue to efficiently engineer 2D spin textures for a plethora of emergent quantum phenomena.