Altermagnets can transfer their unusual magnetic properties to nonmagnetic materials placed next to them, say theorists in China and the US. This so-called “proximity effect” had already been observed in ferromagnets and superconductors, but it is new for altermagnets, which were only recognized as a distinct class of magnetic materials in 2024. If confirmed experimentally, the team says the effect could aid the development of advanced quantum materials with applications in fields such as spintronics, valleytronics and fault-tolerant quantum computing.
In ferromagnets, proximity effects make it possible to tune properties such as magnetic anisotropy, coercivity and exchange bias in nonmagnetic materials that have acquired magnetic polarization from a neighbouring ferromagnet. Similarly, ordinary materials that have picked up superconducting correlations from a nearby superconductor are a mainstay of experiments on topological superconductivity and topological quantum computing.
In the latest research, physicists led by Tong Zhou of the Eastern Institute of Technology in Ningbo sought to understand whether altermagnets could likewise transfer their behaviour to a neighbouring material. To do this, they created a model of a van der Waals bilayer heterostructure in which the bottom layer is a two-dimensional (2D) altermagnet, V2Se2O, while the top layer is a non-magnetic semiconductor, PbO.
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