Magnetic Mosaic from Stacked Layers express
Two sheets stacked together behave differently than they do separately. The same is true in the world of two-dimensional crystals: if you take two layers of a material one atom thick and place them on top of each other with a slight shift, their magnetic properties can change completely. This is exactly what calculations showed for MA₂Z₄ compounds — relatives of the well-known MoS₂, discovered in 2020.
In the study, two types of metal atoms, manganese and iron, were considered in layers with silicon and nitrogen. It turned out that for a certain stacking, reminiscent of graphite stacking, the interlayer interaction does not just add a small correction but directly competes with the forces within each layer. This competition determines which magnetic pattern emerges: the layers can align in the same direction or in opposite directions.
Such sensitivity to stacking opens the way to creating materials where magnetic properties can be tuned by simply shifting the layers. This is important for spintronics — a field where information is encoded not by the electron's charge but by its spin, i.e., its intrinsic magnetic moment.
The study was carried out using first-principles calculations, which require no fitting parameters and rely only on the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics. The obtained data allowed the construction of an effective model describing the behavior of spins in a bilayer system and precisely determining the ground magnetic state and low-lying excitations.
MA₂Z₄ compounds were discovered only a few years ago, but they are already considered a promising platform for magnetism in the two-dimensional limit.