2020/03/13 by Wenshen Song, Ruixiang Fei, Li Yang +1 · 24 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Chemical Physics Studies #Chromium #Layer (electronics) #Luminescence Properties of Advanced Materials #Materials science #Metallurgy #Nanotechnology #Photorefractive and Nonlinear Optics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Triiodide #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #physics.comp-ph #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.102.045411
published in Physical review. B./Physical review. B 102(4) (American Physical Society) · 8 pages and 8 figures
arxiv created 2020/03/13 · openalex publication_date 2020/07/09 · arxiv updated 2020/07/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
It is of fundamental importance but challenging to simultaneously identify atomic and magnetic configurations of two-dimensional van der Waals materials. In this work, we show that the nonreciprocal second-harmonic generation (SHG) can be a powerful tool to answer this challenge. Despite the preserved lattice inversion symmetry, the interlayer antiferromagnetic order and spin-orbit coupling generate and enhance SHG in parity-time (PT) -symmetric bilayer chromium triiodide (CrI3). Importantly, the in-plane polarization-resolved SHG is sensitive to the subtly different interlayer structures that cannot be differentiated by linear optical spectra. Beyond bilayer, we further predict that the intensity and angle-resolved SHG can be employed to identify both interlayer atomic and magnetic configurations of trilayer CrI3. Our first-principles results agree with available measurements and show the potential of SHG as a noncontact approach to explore correlations between interlayer structures and magnetic orders of emerging ultrathin magnetic materials.