Varied Magnetic Phases in a van der Waals Easy-Plane Antiferromagnet Revealed by Nitrogen-Vacancy Center Microscopy

Abstract

Interest in van der Waals materials often stems from a desire to miniaturize existing technologies by exploiting their intrinsic layered structures to create near-atomically thin components that do not suffer from surface defects. One appealing property is an easily switchable yet robust magnetic order, which is only sparsely demonstrated in the case of in-plane anisotropy. In this work, we use widefield nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center magnetic imaging to measure the properties of individual flakes of CuCrP2S6, a multiferroic van der Waals magnet known to exhibit weak easy-plane anisotropy in the bulk. We chart the crossover between the in-plane ferromagnetism in thin flakes down to the trilaye..