Magnetism and odd numbers

We’ve talked about Prof. Dr. Patrick Maletinsky’s research ([1], [2]) in several ocasions. His research group is excelling at the development of new microscopies. Recently they’ve pushed the envelope another step further by for the first time “measuring the magnetic properties of atomically thin van der Waals materials on the nanoscale”. 2D materials are going to play a key role in the next technological revolution. And the we need tools to study and characterize these systems.

Quantum Sensing Lab together with several groups at the university of Geneva, have determined the magnetic properties of single atomic layers of chromium triiodide (CrI3).

By carefully doing this, they’ve found that the magnetic properties of this material depends on the number of layers of CrI3: an even number of layers produces no magnetic fields while an odd number of them, produces the same fields as a single CrI3 layers. This results have been published in Science.

We made this picture to illustrate this amazing step forward with the help of Patrick Maletinsky and Lucas Thiel. [Read more at UniBas]

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