Magnetic materials often exhibit complex energy landscapes with multiple local minima, each corresponding to a self-consistent electronic structure solution. Finding the global minimum is challenging, and heuristic methods are not always guaranteed to succeed. Here, we apply a recently developed automated workflow to systematically explore the energy landscape of 194 magnetic monolayers obtained from the Materials Cloud 2D crystals database and determine their ground-state magnetic order. Our approach enables effective control and sampling of orbital occupation matrices, allowing rapid identification of local minima. We find a diverse set of self-consistent collinear metastable states, further enriched by Hubbard-corrected energy functionals, when the U parameters have been computed from first principles using linear-response theory. We categorise the monolayers by their magnetic ordering and highlight promising candidates. Our results include 109 ferromagnetic, 83 antiferromagnetic, and 2 altermagnetic monolayers, along with 12 novel ferromagnetic half-metals with potential for spintronics technologies.
@article{arxiv.2509.09531,
title = {Exploring the magnetic landscape of easily-exfoliable two-dimensional materials},
author = {Fatemeh Haddadi and Davide Campi and Flaviano dos Santos and Nicolas Mounet and Louis Ponet and Nicola Marzari and Marco Gibertini},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.09531},
year = {2025}
}