heterostructures*

Ruthenium Chloride (RuCl₃), a spin-orbit assisted Mott insulator, presents exciting physics thanks to spin-orbit entangled moments with interactions that are highly anisotropic, making it a close realization to the Heisenberg-Kitaev model. RuCl₃’s highly insulating character limits the accessible experimental techniques to those requiring bulk crystals, such as resonant magnetic scattering, magnetic susceptibility or heat capacity measurements. Here, we design and measure devices that implement few layers of RuCl₃ into an electronic device to form a Gr/RuCl₃ Van der Waals heterostructure (similar to heterostructures reported recently [1]) with the aim of studying in a quantum coherent regime, signatures of proximity effects between graphene and RuCl₃’s magnetic ordered state at low temperatures.
[1] B. Zhou, J. Balgley, P. Lampen-Kelley, J.-Q. Yan, and D. G. Mandrus and E. A. Henriksen, Phys. Rev. B 100, 165426 (2019).