Two-dimensional materials have proven to be a prolific breeding ground of new and unstudied forms of magnetism and unusual metallic states, particularly when tuned between their insulating and metallic phases. In this paper we present work on a new metal to insulator transition system FePS3 . This compound is a two-dimensional van-der-Waals antiferromagnetic Mott insulator. Here we report the discovery of an insulator-metal transition in FePS3, as evidenced by x-ray diffraction and electrical transport measurements, using high pressure as a tuning parameter. Two structural phase transitions are observed in the x-ray diffraction data as a function of pressure and resistivity measurements show evidence of onset of a metallic state at high pressures. We propose models for the two new structures that can successfully explain the x-ray diffraction patterns.
@article{arxiv.1801.10089,
title = {Structural and electronic phase transitions in FePS$_3$ under the application of pressure},
author = {C. R. S. Haines and M. J. Coak and G. I. Lampronti and C. Liu and H. Hamidov and A. R. Wildes and D. Daisenberger and P. Nahai-Williamson and S. S. Saxena},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.10089},
year = {2019}
}