Long Range Intrinsic Ferromagnetism in Two Dimensional Materials and Dissipationless Future Technologies

TL;DR

This review discusses recent advances in two-dimensional ferromagnetic materials, highlighting their potential for dissipationless electronics, spintronics, and topological quantum devices, and predicts new materials with promising applications.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress, discusses mechanisms enabling 2D ferromagnetism, and predicts new materials for future technological applications.

Findings

Several atomically thin ferromagnets have been experimentally demonstrated.

Magneto crystalline anisotropy is key to stabilizing 2D ferromagnetism.

Potential for realizing dissipationless electronic devices via 2D ferromagnets.

Abstract

The inherent susceptibility of low-dimensional materials to thermal fluctuations has long been expected to poses a major challenge to achieving intrinsic long-range ferromagnetic order in two-dimensional materials. The recent explosion of interest in atomically thin materials and their assembly into van der Waals heterostructures has renewed interest in two-dimensional ferromagnetism, which is interesting from a fundamental scientific point of view and also offers a missing ingredient necessary for the realization of spintronic functionality in van der Waals heterostructures. Recently several atomically thin materials have been shown to be robust ferromagnets. Such ferromagnetism is thought to be enabled by magneto crystalline anisotropy which suppresses thermal fluctuations. In this article, we review recent progress in two-dimensional ferromagnetism in detail and predict new possible two-dimensional ferromagnetic materials. We also discuss the prospects for applications of atomically thin ferromagnets in novel dissipationless electronics, spintronics, and other conventional magnetic technologies. Particularly atomically thin ferromagnets are promising to realize time reversal symmetry breaking in two-dimensional topological systems, providing a platform for electronic devices based on the quantum anomalous Hall Effect showing dissipationless transport. Our proposed directions will assist the scientific community to explore novel two-dimensional ferromagnetic families which can spawn new technologies and further improve the fundamental understanding of this fascinating area.