Mechanical Detection of Magnetic Phase Transition in Suspended CrOCl Heterostructures

Abstract

With their outstanding mechanical and magnetic characteristics, two-dimensional magnetic materials have attracted wide attentions in the field of nanoelectromechanics and spintronics. By tuning the mechanical resonance with external knobs, such as strain, electric and magnetic control, nanoelectromechanical sensors with novel functionalities have been successfully demonstrated. Here, we investigate the mechanical properties of the suspended membranes with few-layered antiferromagnetic material CrOCl. The results show that the Young’s modulus of CrOCl resonators is ~137.29 GPa by using a static detection method. Below the transition temperature TN, the mechanical resonance is found to strongly depend on the magnetic fields with an enormous blueshift of ~3.1% in the magnetic-field-induced phase transition. In addition, we also found that the variation of strain of system ∆ϵ was about 1.5 × 10−3 during the transition. Our study shows the great potential of two-dimensional magnetic materials in future nanoelectronic applications.

Keywords

• nanomechanical resonators
• Young’s modulus
• CrOCl
• van der Waals heterostructures