Electric-Field-Tunable Luttinger compensated antiferromagnetism in double CrCl2 chains

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how external and interfacial electric fields can induce and control Luttinger compensated antiferromagnetism in CrCl2 chains, offering new avenues for spintronic device design.

Contribution

It introduces a method to realize and tune LcAFM states in one-dimensional CrCl2 chains through electric fields and heterostructure engineering, expanding spintronic material options.

Findings

Electric fields induce LcAFM in CrCl2 chains.

Band gap and spin splitting are tunable by electric fields.

Interfacial charge transfer in heterostructures mimics external field effects.

Abstract

Luttinger compensated antiferromagnets (LcAFMs), combining spin polarization with vanishing net magnetization, offering distinct advantages for next-generation spintronic applications. Using first-principles calculations, we demonstrate that conventional antiferromagnetic CrCl2 double chains can be transformed into one-dimensional LcAFMs under an external electric field, exhibiting pronounced isotropic spin splitting. The magnitude of the splitting, as well as the band gap, can be effectively tuned by both in-plane and out-of-plane fields, thereby providing greater controllability than in two-dimensional counterparts. To further enhance the tunability, we design a nearly lattice-matched CrCl2/MoTe2 heterostructure and uncover that interfacial charge transfer generates a built-in electric field, inducing spin splitting comparable to that driven by external fields. These results establish interfacial engineering as a highly efficient route to realize and manipulate LcAFM states in low-dimensional magnets, expanding the design principles for spintronic functionalities at the nanoscale.