3D Heisenberg universality in the van der Waals antiferromagnet NiPS3

作者：Rajan Plumley, Sougata Mardanya, Peng Cheng, Johannes Nokelainen, Tadesse A. Assefa, L. Shen, N. G. Burdet, Zach Porter, Alexander N. Petsch, Aidan Israelski, Hongwei Chen, Jun‐Sik Lee, Sophie A. Morley, Sujoy Roy, G. Fabbris, E. Blackburn, Adrian Feiguin, Arun Bansil, Wei-Sheng Lee, Aaron M. Lindenberg, Sugata Chowdhury, Mike Dunne, Joshua J. Turner · 发表于：npj Quantum Materials · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1038/s41535-024-00696-6 · 被引用次数：8 · 研究领域：2D Materials and Applications、Advanced Condensed Matter Physics、Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism

Abstract Van der Waals (vdW) magnetic materials are comprised of layers of atomically thin sheets, making them ideal platforms for studying magnetism at the two-dimensional (2D) limit. These materials are at the center of a host of novel types of experiments, however, there are notably few pathways to directly probe their magnetic structure. We confirm the magnetic order within a single crystal of NiPS 3 and show it can be accessed with resonant elastic X-ray diffraction along the edge of the vdW planes in a carefully grown crystal by detecting structurally forbidden resonant magnetic X-ray scattering. We find the magnetic order parameter has a critical exponent of β ~ 0.36, indicating that the magnetism of these vdW crystals is more adequately characterized by the three-dimensional (3D) Heisenberg universality class. We verify these findings with first-principles density functional theory, Monte-Carlo simulations, and density matrix renormalization group calculations.