Magnetic van der Waals (vdW) materials offer a fantastic platform to investigate and exploit rich spin configurations stabilized in reduced dimensions. One tantalizing magnetic order is the interlayer antiferromagnetism in A-type vdW antiferromagnet, which may be effectively modified by the magnetic field, stacking order and thickness scaling. However, atomically revealing the interlayer spin orientation in the vdW antiferromagnet is highly challenging, because most of the material candidates exhibit an insulating ground state or instability in ambient conditions. Here, we report the layer-dependent interlayer antiferromagnetic reorientation in air-stable semiconductor CrSBr using magnetotransport characterization and first-principles calculations. We reveal a pronounced odd-even layer effect of interlayer reorientation, which originates from the competitions among interlayer exchange, magnetic anisotropy energy and extra Zeeman energy of uncompensated magnetization. Furthermore, we quantitatively constructed the layer-dependent magnetic phase diagram with the help of a linear-chain model. Our work uncovers the layer-dependent interlayer antiferromagnetic reorientation engineered by magnetic field in the air-stable semiconductor, which could contribute to future vdW spintronic devices.
@article{arxiv.2205.09077,
title = {Layer-dependent interlayer antiferromagnetic spin reorientation in air-stable semiconductor CrSBr},
author = {Chen Ye and Cong Wang and Qiong Wu and Sheng Liu and Jiayuan Zhou and Guopeng Wang and Aljoscha Soll and Zdenek Sofer and Ming Yue and Xue Liu and Mingliang Tian and Qihua Xiong and Wei Ji and X. Renshaw Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.09077},
year = {2022}
}