Intercalated van der Waals (vdW) magnetic materials host unique magnetic properties due to the interplay of competing interlayer and intralayer exchange couplings, which depend on the intercalant concentration within the van der Waals gaps. Magnetic vdW compound chromium telluride, Cr1+xTe2, has demonstrated rich magnetic phases at various Cr concentrations, such as the coexistence of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic phases in Cr1.25Te2 (equivalently, Cr5Te8). The compound is induced by intercalating 0.25 Cr atom per unit cell within the van der Waals gaps of CrTe2. In this work, we report a notably increased Curie Temperature and an emergent in-plane spin fluctuation by slightly reducing the concentration of Cr intercalants in Cr1.25Te2. Moreover, the intercalated Cr atoms form a metastable 2×2 supercell structure that can be manipulated by electron beam irradiation. This work offers a promising approach to tuning magnetic and structural properties by adjusting the concentration of intercalated magnetic atoms.
@article{arxiv.2411.13721,
title = {Emergent Spin Fluctuation and Structural Metastability in Self-Intercalated Cr$_{1+x}$Te$_2$ Compounds},
author = {Clayton Conner and Ali Sarikhani and Theo Volz and Mathew Pollard and Mitchel Vaninger and Xiaoqing He and Steven Kelley and Jacob Cook and Avinash Sah and John Clark and Hunter Lucker and Cheng Zhang and Paul Miceli and Yew San Hor and Xiaoqian Zhang and Guang Bian},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.13721},
year = {2026}
}