Abstract
The emergence of atomically thin van der Waals magnets provides a new platform for the studies of two-dimensional magnetism and its applications. However, the widely used measurement methods in recent studies cannot provide quantitative information of the magnetization nor achieve nanoscale spatial resolution. These capabilities are essential to explore the rich properties of magnetic domains and spin textures. Here, we employ cryogenic scanning magnetometry using a single-electron spin of a nitrogen-vacancy center in a diamond probe to unambiguously prove the existence of magnetic domains and study their dynamics in atomically thin CrBr3. By controlling the magnetic domain evolution as a function of magnetic field, we find that the pinning effect is a dominant coercivity mechanism and determine the magnetization of a CrBr3 bilayer to be about 26 Bohr magnetons per square nanometer. The high spatial resolution of this technique enables imaging of magnetic domains and allows to locate the sites of defects that pin the domain walls and nucleate the reverse domains. Our work highlights scanning nitrogen-vacancy center magnetometry as a quantitative probe to explore nanoscale features in two-dimensional magnets.
Highlights
The emergence of atomically thin van der Waals magnets provides a new platform for the studies of two-dimensional magnetism and its applications
Magnetic domains in layered CrBr3 have been predicted from its anomalous hysteresis loop in magneto-photoluminescence and micromagnetometry measurements[15,16], but the magnetic domain structure and its evolution has not been detected in real space
The negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center has been demonstrated as a high sensitivity magnetometer with operational temperatures from below one to several hundreds of Kelvin[28], which is suitable to probe most of the discovered van der Walls (vdW) magnets
Summary
The emergence of atomically thin van der Waals magnets provides a new platform for the studies of two-dimensional magnetism and its applications. The widely used measurement methods in recent studies cannot provide quantitative information of the magnetization nor achieve nanoscale spatial resolution. These capabilities are essential to explore the rich properties of magnetic domains and spin textures. The discovery of atomically thin van der Walls (vdW) magnetic materials enables fundamental studies of magnetism in various spin systems in the two-dimensional (2D) limit[1,2] Advantages, such as easy fabrication and a wide variety of control mechanisms[3,4,5,6,7,8,9], make the vdW magnets and their heterostructures promising candidates for next-generation spintronic devices. The magnetic field is measured using the continuous wave (cw) optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR)
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