Kavli Affiliate: Leon Balents
| First 5 Authors: Zhuoliang Ni, Urban Seifert, Amanda V. Haglund, Nan Huang, David G. Mandrus
| Summary:
In a collinear antiferromagnet, spins tend to cant towards the direction of
an applied magnetic field, thereby decreasing the energy of the system. The
canting angle becomes negligible when the magnetic field is small so that the
induced anisotropic energy is substantially lower than the exchange energy.
However, this tiny anisotropy can play a significant role when the intrinsic
anisotropy of the antiferromagnet is small. In our work, we conduct direct
imaging of the N’eel vector in a two-dimensional easy-plane antiferromagnet,
MnPSe$_3$, with negligible spin canting under an external in-plane magnetic
field. The small inherent in-plane anisotropy allows for the continuous
rotation of the N’eel vector by ramping up the magnetic field in samples from
the bulk to the monolayer. In monolayer samples, the applied magnetic field
elevates the N’eel temperature 10$%$ at 5 tesla, as the combination of
intrinsic and field-induced anisotropies set a critical temperature scale for
fluctuations of the otherwise disordered N’eel vector field. Our study
illuminates the contribution of field-induced anisotropy in two dimensional
magnets with in-plane anisotropy. We also demonstrate that the strain can tune
the spin flop transition field strength by one order of magnitude.
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