No Arabic abstract
Van der Waals heterostructures have risen as a tunable platform to combine different electronic orders, due to the flexibility in stacking different materials with competing symmetry broken states. Among them, van der Waals ferromagnets such as CrI3 and superconductors as NbSe2 provide a natural platform to engineer novel phenomena at ferromagnet-superconductor interfaces. In particular, NbSe2 is well known for hosting strong spin-orbit coupling effects that influence the properties of the superconducting state. Here we put forward a ferromagnet/NbSe2/ferromagnet heterostructure where the interplay between Ising superconductivity in NbSe2 and magnetism controls the magnetic alignment of the heterostructure. In particular, we show that the interplay between spin-orbit coupling and superconductivity allows controlling magnetic states in van der Waals materials. Our results show how hybrid van der Waals ferromagnet/superconductor heterostructure can be used as a tunable materials platform for superconducting spin-orbitronics.
The development of van der Waals (vdW) crystals and their heterostructures has created a fascinating platform for exploring optoelectronic properties in the two-dimensional (2D) limit. With the recent discovery of 2D magnets, the control of the spin degree of freedom can be integrated to realize 2D spin-optoelectronics with spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking. Here, we report spin photovoltaic effects in vdW heterostructures of atomically thin magnet chromium triiodide (CrI3) sandwiched by graphene contacts. In the absence of a magnetic field, the photocurrent displays a distinct dependence on light helicity, which can be tuned by varying the magnetic states and photon energy. Circular polarization-resolved absorption measurements reveal that these observations originate from magnetic-order-coupled and thus helicity-dependent charge-transfer exciton states. The photocurrent displays multiple plateaus as the magnetic field is swept, which are associated with different spin configurations enabled by the layered antiferromagnetism and spin-flip transitions in CrI3. Remarkably, giant photo-magnetocurrent is observed, which tends to infinity for a small applied bias. Our results pave the way to explore emergent photo-spintronics by engineering magnetic vdW heterostructures.
Advances in low-dimensional superconductivity are often realized through improvements in material quality. Apart from a small group of organic materials, there is a near absence of clean-limit two-dimensional (2D) superconductors, which presents an impediment to the pursuit of numerous long-standing predictions for exotic superconductivity with fragile pairing symmetries. Here, we report the development of a bulk superlattice consisting of the transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) superconductor 2$H$-niobium disulfide (2$H$-NbS$_2$) and a commensurate block layer that yields dramatically enhanced two-dimensionality, high electronic quality, and clean-limit inorganic 2D superconductivity. The structure of this material may naturally be extended to generate a distinct family of 2D superconductors, topological insulators, and excitonic systems based on TMDs with improved material properties.
Magnetic proximity effects are crucial ingredients for engineering spintronic, superconducting, and topological phenomena in heterostructures. Such effects are highly sensitive to the interfacial electronic properties, such as electron wave function overlap and band alignment. The recent emergence of van der Waals (vdW) magnets enables the possibility of tuning proximity effects via designing heterostructures with atomically clean interfaces. In particular, atomically thin CrI3 exhibits layered antiferromagnetism, where adjacent ferromagnetic monolayers are antiferromagnetically coupled. Exploiting this magnetic structure, we uncovered a layer-resolved magnetic proximity effect in heterostructures formed by monolayer WSe2 and bi/trilayer CrI3. By controlling the individual layer magnetization in CrI3 with a magnetic field, we found that the spin-dependent charge transfer between WSe2 and CrI3 is dominated by the interfacial CrI3 layer, while the proximity exchange field is highly sensitive to the layered magnetic structure as a whole. These properties enabled us to use monolayer WSe2 as a spatially sensitive magnetic sensor to map out layered antiferromagnetic domain structures at zero magnetic field as well as antiferromagnetic/ferromagnetic domains near the spin-flip transition in bilayer CrI3. Our work reveals a new way to control proximity effects and probe interfacial magnetic order via vdW engineering.
Structural and superconducting transitions of layered van der Waals (vdW) hydrogenated germanene (GeH) were observed under high-pressure compression and decompression processes. GeH possesses a superconducting transition at critical temperature (Tc) of 5.41 K at 8.39 GPa. A crystalline to amorphous transition occurs at 16.80 GPa while superconductivity remains. An abnormally increased Tc up to 6.1 K has been observed in the decompression process while the GeH remained amorphous. Thorough in-situ high-pressure synchrotron X-ray diffraction and in-situ high-pressure Raman spectroscopy with the density functional theory simulations suggest that the superconductivity of GeH should be attributed to the increased density of states at the Fermi level as well as the enhanced electron-phonon coupling effect under high pressure. The decompression-driven superconductivity enhancement arises from pressure-induced phonon softening related to an in-plane Ge-Ge phonon mode. As an amorphous metal hydride superconductor, GeH provides a platform to study amorphous hydride superconductivity in layered vdW materials.
Two-dimensional (2D) topological superconductors are highly desired because they not only offer opportunities for exploring novel exotic quantum physics, but also possesses potential applications in quantum computation. However, there are few reports on 2D superconductors, let alone topological superconductors. Here, we find a 2D monolayer W$_2$N$_3$, which can be exfoliated from its real van der Waals bulk material with much lower exfoliation energy than MoS$_2$, to be a topological metal with exotic topological states at different energy level. Due to the Van Hove singularities, the density of states near Fermi level are high, making the monolayer a compensate metal. Moreover, the monolayer W$_2$N$_3$ is unveiled to be a superconductor with the superconducting transition temperature Tc $sim$ 22 K and a superconducting gap of about 5 meV based on the anisotropic Migdal-Eliashberg formalism, arising from the strong electron-phonon coupling around the $Gamma$ point. Because of the strong electron and lattice coupling, the monolayer displays a non-Fermi liquid behavior in its normal states at temperatures lower than 80 K, where the specific heat exhibit T$^3$ behavior and the Wiedemann-Franz law dramatically violates. Our findings not only provide the platform to study the emergent phenomena in 2D topological superconductors, but also open a door to discover more 2D high-temperature topological superconductors in van der Waals materials.