Physics

Magnetic semiconductor

Magnetization

Ferromagnetism

Magnetic field

van der Waals force

Spintronics

Materials science

Magnetism

Condensed matter physics

Molecule

Quantum mechanics

Electric field

Curie temperature

Nature Nanotechnology

Manipulating a quantum state via electrostatic gating has been of great importance for many model systems in nanoelectronics. Until now, however, controlling the electron spins or, more specifically, the magnetism of a system by electric-field tuning has proven challenging1–4. Recently, atomically thin magnetic semiconductors have attracted significant attention due to their emerging new physical phenomena5–13. However, many issues are yet to be resolved to convincingly demonstrate gate-controllable magnetism in these two-dimensional materials. Here, we show that, via electrostatic gating, a strong field effect can be observed in devices based on few-layered ferromagnetic semiconducting Cr2Ge2Te6. At different gate doping, micro-area Kerr measurements in the studied devices demonstrate bipolar tunable magnetization loops below the Curie temperature, which is tentatively attributed to the moment rebalance in the spin-polarized band structure. Our findings of electric-field-controlled magnetism in van der Waals magnets show possibilities for potential applications in new-generation magnetic memory storage, sensors and spintronics. Few-layer semiconducting Cr2Ge2Te6 shows bipolar gate-tuned magnetism below its ferromagnetic Curie temperature.

Electric-field control of magnetism in a few-layered van der Waals ferromagnetic semiconductor