We have investigated the magnetic properties of highly anisotropic layered ferromagnetic semiconductor CrI3 in presence of hydrostatic pressure (P). At ambient pressure, magnetization exhibits a clear anomaly below 212 K along with a thermal hysteresis over a wide temperature range (212-180 K), where a first-order structural transition is observed. CrI3 undergoes a second-order ferromagnetic-paramagnetic phase transition with Curie temperature TC=60.4 K. With application of pressure, the transition becomes sharper and TC is found to increase from 60.4 to 64.9 K as P increases from 0 to 1.0 GPa. TC increases with P in a sublinear fashion. The thermal hysteresis in magnetization and the increase of TC with pressure suggest that the spin and lattice degrees of freedom are coupled. The observed increase in TC has been explained on the basis of change in inter-layer coupling and Cr-I-Cr bond angle with pressure.
@article{arxiv.1901.00706,
title = {Effect of hydrostatic pressure on ferromagnetism in two-dimensional CrI$_3$},
author = {Suchanda Mondal and Murugesan Kannan and Moumita Das and Linganan Govindaraj and Ratnadwip Singha and Biswarup Satpati and Sonachalam Arumugam and Prabhat Mandal},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.00706},
year = {2019}
}