Magneto-optical Kerr Effect in Ferroelectric Antiferromagnetic Two-Dimensional Heterostructures

Ning Ding; Kunihiro Yananose; Carlo Rizza; Feng-Ren Fan; Shuai Dong; Alessandro Stroppa

doi:10.1021/acsami.3c02680

Magneto-optical Kerr Effect in Ferroelectric Antiferromagnetic Two-Dimensional Heterostructures

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2023 May 10;15(18):22282-22290. doi: 10.1021/acsami.3c02680. Epub 2023 Apr 20.

Authors

Ning Ding¹, Kunihiro Yananose², Carlo Rizza³, Feng-Ren Fan⁴, Shuai Dong¹, Alessandro Stroppa^{3

5}

Affiliations

¹ School of Physics, Southeast University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 21189, People's Republic of China.
² Center for Theoretical Physics, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, Republic of Korea.
³ Department of Physical and Chemical Sciences, University of L'Aquila, Via Vetoio, I-67100 Coppito, L'Aquila, Italy.
⁴ Department of Physics and Guangdong-Hong Kong Joint Laboratory of Quantum Matter, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People's Republic of China.
⁵ Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Institute for Superconducting and Innovative Materials and Devices (CNR-SPIN), University of L'Aquila, Via Vetoio, I-67100 Coppito, L'Aquila, Italy.

PMID: 37078781
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.3c02680

Abstract

We studied the magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE) of two-dimensional (2D) heterostructure CrI₃/In₂Se₃/CrI₃ using density functional theory calculations and symmetry analysis. The spontaneous polarization in the In₂Se₃ ferroelectric layer and the antiferromagnetic ordering in CrI₃ layers break the mirror and the time-reversal symmetry, thus activating MOKE. We show that the Kerr angle can be reversed by either the polarization or the antiferromagnetic order parameter. Our results suggest that ferroelectric and antiferromagnetic 2D heterostructures could be exploited for ultracompact information storage devices, where the information is encoded by the two ferroelectric or the two time-reversed antiferromagnetic states and the read-out is performed optically by MOKE.

Keywords: antiferromagnetism; ferroelectricity; magneto-optical Kerr effect; spin texture; switching behavior; two-dimensional heterostructure; two-dimensional magnetism.