Special Seminar: Spintronics application of van der Waals magnets

2D magnets, or van der Waals magnets, have been attracting much attention worldwide since they were first reported by a series of papers in 2016 [1]. Over the past few years, much of the focus has been on the discovery of new materials and, once discovered, their unique physical properties. Alongside these fantastic developments of academic curiosity, another noticeable progress can be found in intensive efforts to bring these new materials towards valuable applications. Among them, spintronics is most promising as these van der Waals magnets offer unimaginable new opportunities, not least because they are intrinsically atomically thin and better suited for nm-scale electronics. In this talk, I will take one example in Fe3GeTe2, a ferromagnetic metal. Using some unique properties of this compound, I will demonstrate that a completely new concept of spin-based devices can be, at least, conceptually feasible [2].

[1] J.-G. Park, JPCM 28, 301001 (2016); C-T Kuo et al., Scientific Reports 6, 20904 (2016); S. Lee et al., APL Materials 4, 086108 (2016); J-U Lee et al., Nano Lett. 16, 7433–7438 (2016)

[2] K. Zhang et al., Adv. Materials 33, 2004110 (2021); Advanced Functional Materials 31, 2105992 (2021); Advanced Materials (accepted)