Controlling magnetism through Ising superconductivity in magnetic van der Waals heterostructures

Abstract

Van der Waals heterostructures have risen as a tunable platform to combine different electronic orders, due to the flexibility in stacking different materials with competing symmetry broken states. Among them, van der Waals ferromagnets such as CrI3, CrBr3, or CrCl3 and superconductors as NbSe2 provide a natural platform to engineer novel phenomena at ferromagnet-superconductor interfaces. In particular, NbSe2 is well known for hosting strong spin-orbit coupling effects that influence the properties of the superconducting state. Here we put forward a ferromagnet/NbSe2/ferromagnet heterostructure where the interplay between Ising superconductivity in NbSe2 and magnetism controls the magnetic alignment of the heterostructure. In particular, we show that the interplay between spin-orbit coupling and superconductivity provides a new mechanism to control magnetic ordering in van der Waals materials. We show that this coupling allows creating heterostructures featuring a magnetic phase transition from in-plane to out-of-plane associated with the onset of superconductivity. Our results show how a hybrid van der Waals ferromagnet/superconductor heterostructure can be used as a tunable materials platform for superconducting spin-orbitronics.