Magnetic Ferroelectric Metal in Bilayer Fe3gete2 Under Interlayer Sliding

Abstract

The inherent interlayer freedom in van der Waals stacked materials provides an excellent opportunity to investigate ferroelectric-like behavior through interlayer translation. Based on first-principles calculations, we find that the interlayer sliding in Fe3GeTe2 (FGT) bilayer enables the coexistence of polarization, metallicity, and ferromagnetism. We find that the polarization is induced by the uncompensated vertical interlayer charge transfer, and can be switched by an in-plane interlayer sliding. A moderate biaxial strain can reverse the polarization direction of the sliding FGT bilayer. The vertical polarization disentangles with the in-plane conductivity as was previously seen in the sliding ferroelectric WTe2 bilayer. Our work proposes an extremely rare magnetic ferroelectric metal phase that is useful for magnetoelectric and spintronic applications.

Keywords: Fe3GeTe2, ferromagnetic, sliding ferroelectric, polarization, magnetic ferroelectric metal