Magneto-Optical Properties on Emerging Antiferromagnetic 2D Materials

• Grant number: 25/00520-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate (Direct)
• Start date: June 01, 2025
• End date: April 30, 2030
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Physics - Condensed Matter Physics
• Principal Investigator: Marcio Daldin Teodoro
• Grantee: Gabriel Albuquerque Dias Souza
• Host Institution: Centro de Ciências Exatas e de Tecnologia (CCET). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Two-dimensional materials have emerged as a major focus of academic research over the past two decades, both for studying their fundamental properties and for developing nano-structured devices. Among these materials, transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) stand out as promising two-dimensional semiconductors due to properties such as having a direct bandgap in their monolayer form and exhibiting excitons at room temperature. Consequently, there has been a significant effort to fabricate and study heterostructures formed by TMD monolayers, as the interactions between different layers can give rise to new phenomena in these materials.Another class of two-dimensional semiconductors that has recently gained attention due to their antiferromagnetic properties is the family of metal phosphorus trichalcogenides (MPTs). However, these antiferromagnetic two-dimensional materials still require detailed investigations compared to the well-characterized TMDs. Additionally, the possibility of inducing magnetic proximity effects in TMDs by stacking them with MPTs increases interest in studying these antiferromagnetic two-dimensional materials and their heterostructures.This direct doctorate project aims to investigate the optical and magneto-optical properties of two-dimensional MPTs (specifically MnPS¿, MnPSe¿, FePS¿, and NiPS¿) and their heterostructures formed with different TMD monolayers (MoS¿ and WSe¿). To this end, we will fabricate these samples and perform photoluminescence and Raman spectroscopy measurements while varying different external parameters, such as temperature, magnetic field, polarization, excitation energy, and excitation power. Through these experiments, we aim to meticulously characterize how the spin ordering of two-dimensional MPTs affects their optical responses and unveil the influence of coupling between MPTs and TMDs on the valley properties of these materials.