Tricritical behavior of two-dimensional intrinsic ferromagnetic semiconducting CrGeTe3
Abstract
CrGeTe3 recently emerges as a new two-dimensional (2D) ferromagnetic semiconductor that is promising for spintronic device applications. Unlike CrSiTe3 whose magnetism can be understood using the 2D-Ising model, CrGeTe3 exhibits a smaller van der Waals gap and larger cleavage energy, which could lead to a transition of magnetic mechanism from 2D to 3D. To confirm this speculation, we investigate the critical behavior CrGeTe3 around the second-order paramagnetic-ferromagnetic phase transition. We obtain the critical exponents estimated by several common experimental techniques including the modified Arrott plot, Kouvel-Fisher method and critical isotherm analysis, which show that the magnetism of CrGeTe3 follows the tricritical mean-field model with the critical exponents \b{eta}, {\gamma}, and {\delta} of 0.240, 1.000, and 5.070, respectively, at the Curie temperature of 67.9 K. We therefore suggest that the magnetic phase transition from 2D to 3D for CrGeTe3 should locate near a tricritical point. Our experiment provides a direct demonstration of the applicability of the tricritical mean-field model to a 2D ferromagnetic semiconductor.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1706.03239,
title = {Tricritical behavior of two-dimensional intrinsic ferromagnetic semiconducting CrGeTe3},
author = {G. T. Lin and H. L. Zhuang and X. Luo and B. J. Liu and F. C. Chen and J. Yan and Y. Sun and J. Zhou and W. J. Lu and P. Tong and Z. G. Sheng and Z. Qu and W. H. Song and X. B. Zhu and Y. P. Sun},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.03239},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
Accepted by Phys. Rev. B