Tunable Strong Magnetic Anisotropy in Two-Dimensional van der Waals Antiferromagnets

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how stacking 2D antiferromagnets on magnetic substrates enhances anisotropic energy, enabling control over magnetic order and creating nonuniform textures with localized magnons through stacking and moiré engineering.

Contribution

It reveals a novel method to tune magnetic anisotropy in 2D antiferromagnets via stacking and moiré patterns, linking interlayer interactions to magnetic control.

Findings

Enhanced anisotropic energy through stacking on magnetic substrates.

Control of antiferromagnetic order via stacking and substrate magnetic order.

Formation of nonuniform textures with localized magnons in moiré superlattices.

Abstract

We show that anisotropic energy of a 2D antiferromagnet is greatly enhanced via stacking on a magnetic substrate layer, arising from the sublattice-dependent interlayer magnetic interaction that defines an effective anisotropic energy. Interestingly, this effective energy couples strongly with the interlayer stacking order and the magnetic order of the substrate layer, providing unique mechanical and magnetic means to control the antiferromagnetic order. These two types of control methods affect distinctly the sublattice magnetization dynamics, with a change of the ratio of sublattice precession amplitudes in the former and its chirality in the later. In moir\'{e} superlattices formed by a relative twist or strain between the layers, the coupling with stacking order introduces a landscape of effective anisotropic energy across the moir\'{e}, which can be utilized to create nonuniform antiferromagnetic textures featuring periodically localized low-energy magnons.