Dávid Hovančík a Ph.D. student at the Department of Condensed matter physics is the leading author of the paper Robust intralayer antiferromagnetism and tricriticality in the van der Waals compound VBr3 selected as Editors’ choice in PRB. This study is the result of a large collaboration between experimentalists and theoreticians from the Department of Condensed Matter Physics, Department of Inorganic Chemistry, Physical Institute of the Czech Academy of Science, Hochfeld-Magnetlabor Dresden, and MGML.
In this paper, the authors demonstrate the strong anisotropy of uniaxial antiferromagnetism in the van der Waals trihalide VBr3, with a tricritical point in the H-T phase diagram in an out-of-plane field. The robustness of the antiferromagnetic state manifested by a high critical metamagnetic field is explained by ab initio calculations that predict a zigzag antiferromagnetic order of V moments described within the J1-J2-J3 model. The observed saturated moment of 1.2 μB/f.u. indicates a significant vanadium orbital moment that is the main ingredient of the strong anisotropy.