Nature Nanotechnology,volume 13, pages 554–559 (2018)

Electric-field control of magnetism in a few-layered van der Waals ferromagnetic semiconductor

Zhi Wang,Tongyao Zhang,Mei Ding,Baojuan Dong,Yanxu Li,Maolin Chen,Xiaoxi Li,Jianqi Huang,Hanwen Wang,Xiaotian Zhao,Yong Li,Da Li1,,Chuankun Jia,Lidong Sun,Huaihong Guo,Yu Ye,Dongming Sun,Yuansen Chen,Teng Yang,Jing Zhang,Shimpei Ono,Zheng Han,Zhidong Zhang

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-018-0186-z

Abstract

Manipulating a quantum state via electrostatic gating has been of great importance for many model systems in nanoelectronics. Until now, however, controlling the electron spins or, more specifically, the magnetism of a system by electric-field tuning has proven challenging1,2,3,4. Recently, atomically thin magnetic semiconductors have attracted significant attention due to their emerging new physical phenomena5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13. However, many issues are yet to be resolved to convincingly demonstrate gate-controllable magnetism in these two-dimensional materials. Here, we show that, via electrostatic gating, a strong field effect can be observed in devices based on few-layered ferromagnetic semiconducting Cr2Ge2Te6. At different gate doping, micro-area Kerr measurements in the studied devices demonstrate bipolar tunable magnetization loops below the Curie temperature, which is tentatively attributed to the moment rebalance in the spin-polarized band structure. Our findings of electric-field-controlled magnetism in van der Waals magnets show possibilities for potential applications in new-generation magnetic memory storage, sensors and spintronics.