#2d materials
Nano-microscope gives first direct observation of the magnetic properties of 2D materials
Australian researchers and their colleagues from Russia and China have shown that it is possible to study the magnetic properties of ultrathin materials directly, via a new microscopy technique that opens the door to the discovery of more two-dimensional (2D) magnetic materials, with all sorts of potential applications.
Published in the journal Advanced Materials, the findings are significant because current techniques used to characterise normal (three-dimensional) magnets don’t work on 2D materials such as graphene due to their extremely small size – a few atom thick.
“So far there has been no way to tell exactly how strongly magnetic a 2D material was,” said Dr Jean-Philippe Tetienne from the University of Melbourne School of Physics and Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology.
“That is, if you were to place the 2D material on your fridge’s door like a regular fridge magnet, how strongly it gets stuck onto it. This is the most important property of a magnet.”
To address the problem, the team, led by Professor Lloyd Hollenberg, employed a widefield nitrogen-vacancy microscope, a tool they recently developed that has the necessary sensitivity and spatial resolution to measure the strength of 2D material.
