Cover Story

Long-range magnetic orders in atomically thin ferromagnetic CrI₃trigger new fascinating physics and application perspectives. However, there remains debate on the stacking order at low temperature. Peng and co-workers investigated the layer, polarization and temperature dependence of the Raman features of non-encapsulated 2−5 layer and bulk CrI₃, demonstrating that the non-encapsulated few-layer and bulk CrI₃ are rhombohedral stacking order at low temperature, rather than monoclinic structure. This work opens up an insight into lattice stacking order and spin-phonon coupling in 2D ferromagnets, and highlights the feasibility for the manipulation of the electron spin and spin waves through spin-phonon coupling toward novel spintronic devices (see the article on pape 413).

Layer dependence of stacking order in nonencapsulated few-layer CrI₃

Kai Guo, Bowen Deng, Zhen Liu, Chaofeng Gao, Zhongtai Shi, Lei Bi, Li Zhang, Haipeng Lu, Peiheng Zhou, Linbo Zhang, Yingchun Cheng, Bo Peng

SCIENCE CHINA Materials, 2020, 63(3): 413–420