It may not seem like a material as thin as an atom could hide any surprises, but a research team led by scientists at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered an unexpected magnetic property in a two-dimensional (2D) material.

The scientists found that a 2D van der Waals crystal, part of a class of materials whose atomically thin layers can be peeled off one-by-one with adhesive tape, possessed an intrinsic ferromagnetism. This discovery, reported in a paper in Nature, could have major implications for a wide range of applications that rely upon ferromagnetic materials, such as nanoscale memory, spintronic devices and magnetic sensors.

Thin films of metals like iron, cobalt and nickel, unlike 2D van der Waals materials, are structurally imperfect and susceptible to various disturbances, which contribute to a huge and unpredictable spurious anisotropy," said Gong. "In contrast, the highly crystalline and uniformly flat 2D CGT, together with its small intrinsic anisotropy, allows small external magnetic fields to effectively engineer the anisotropy, enabling an unprecedented magnetic field control of ferromagnetic transition temperatures.NEXTECK also provide thin film metal materials like iron, cobalt and nickel.

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