Wide field imaging of van der Waals ferromagnet Fe3GeTe2 by spin defects in hexagonal boron nitride

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 13; no. 1; p. 5369
• Main Authors: Huang, Mengqi, Zhou, Jingcheng, Chen, Di, Lu, Hanyi, McLaughlin, Nathan J., Li, Senlei, Alghamdi, Mohammed, Djugba, Dziga, Shi, Jing, Wang, Hailong, Du, Chunhui Rita
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 13-09-2022; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 639/301/357/1018; 639/301/357/997; 639/624/399; 639/925/930/2735; Accessibility; Boron; Boron nitride; Color centers; Curie temperature; Defects; Environmental degradation; Ferromagnetism; Flakes (defects); Heterostructures; Humanities and Social Sciences; Integration; Layered materials; Magnetic properties; Magnetic variations; Magnetism; multidisciplinary; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Vacancies
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-33016-2

Emergent color centers with accessible spins hosted by van der Waals materials have attracted substantial interest in recent years due to their significant potential for implementing transformative quantum sensing technologies. Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is naturally relevant in this context due to its remarkable ease of integration into devices consisting of low-dimensional materials. Taking advantage of boron vacancy spin defects in hBN, we report nanoscale quantum imaging of low-dimensional ferromagnetism sustained in Fe
3
GeTe
2
/hBN van der Waals heterostructures. Exploiting spin relaxometry methods, we have further observed spatially varying magnetic fluctuations in the exfoliated Fe
3
GeTe
2
flake, whose magnitude reaches a peak value around the Curie temperature. Our results demonstrate the capability of spin defects in hBN of investigating local magnetic properties of layered materials in an accessible and precise way, which can be extended readily to a broad range of miniaturized van der Waals heterostructure systems.
Hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) has been used extensively to encapsulate other van der Waals materials, protecting them from environmental degradation, and allowing integration into more complex heterostructures. Here, the authors make use of boron vacancy spin defects in h-BN using them to image the magnetic properties of a Fe
3
GeTe
2
flake.