Chromium(III) Telluride As Ferromagnetic Material With Tunable Anomalous Hall Effect

Chromium(III) Telluride (Cr₂Te₃) is an interesting material for (ferro)magnetic applications, with Yao Wen and colleagues reporting in a 2020 Nano Letters paper that they confirmed it to show spontaneous magnetization at a thickness of less than fifty nanometers, at room temperature. Such a 2D ferromagnet could be very useful for spintronics and other applications. The confirmation of magnetization is performed using a variety of methods, including measuring the Hall Effect (HE) and the Anomalous Hall Effect (AHE), the latter of which is directly dependent on the magnetization of the material, rather than an externally applied field.

More recently, in a June 2023 article by Hang Chi and colleagues in Nature Communications, it is described how such epitaxially obtained Cr₂Te₃ films show a distinct change in the AHE (in the form of sign reversal) depending on the strain induced by the interface with the various types of substrates (Al₂O₃, SrTiO₃) and the temperature, likely owing to the different thermal expansion rates of the film and substrate. Underlying this change in the observed AHE is the Berry phase and the related curvature. This is a phenomenon that was also noted by Quentin Guillet and colleagues in their 2023 article in Physical  Review Materials, effectively independently confirming the AHE

Using Cr₂Te₃ in combination with the appropriate substrate might ultimately lead to spintronics-based memory and other devices, even if such applications will still take considerable R&D.

Top image: Crystal structure of Cr₂Te₃ thin films. (Credit: Hang Chi et al. 2023)

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• Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/11/29/chromiumiii-telluride-as-ferromagnetic-material-with-tunable-anomalous-hall-effect/