Room Temperature Magnetic Order in Air-Stable Ultra-Thin Iron Oxide

TL;DR

This paper reports the synthesis of air-stable, ultra-thin epsilon-phase iron oxide crystals that exhibit robust room-temperature magnetic order, enabling potential applications in 2D spintronic devices.

Contribution

The study demonstrates the growth of air-stable epsilon-phase iron oxide in 2D form with intrinsic ferromagnetism at room temperature, which was previously unachievable in bulk or unstable forms.

Findings

Epsilon-phase iron oxide can be synthesized in 2D down to seven unit cells.

The 2D epsilon-phase exhibits strong magnetic coercivity at room temperature.

The material is chemically stable and can be produced via cost-effective CVD.

Abstract

Certain two-dimensional (2D) materials exhibit intriguing properties such as valley polarization, ferroelectricity, superconductivity and charge-density waves. Many of these materials can be manually assembled into atomic-scale multilayer devices under ambient conditions, owing to their exceptional chemical stability. Efforts have been made to add a magnetic degree of freedom to these 2D materials via defects, but only local magnetism has been achieved. Only with the recent discoveries of 2D materials supporting intrinsic ferromagnetism have stacked spintronic devices become realistic. Assembling 2D multilayer devices with these ferromagnets under ambient conditions remains challenging due to their sensitivity to environmental degradation, and magnetic order at room temperature is rare in van der Waals materials. Here, we report the growth of air-stable ultra-thin epsilon-phase iron oxide crystals that exhibit magnetic order at room temperature. These crystals require no passivation and can be prepared in large quantity by cost-effective chemical vapor deposition (CVD). We find that the epsilon phase, which is energetically unfavorable and does not form in bulk, can be easily made in 2D down to a seven unit-cell thickness. Magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE) magnetometry of individual crystals shows that even at this ultrathin limit the epsilon phase exhibits robust magnetism with coercive fields of hundreds of mT. These measurements highlight the advantages of ultrathin iron oxide as a promising candidate towards air-stable 2D magnetism and integration into 2D spintronic devices.