Magneto-Optical Effects in Nanostructures of van der Waals Antiferromagnet

Magneto-optical (MO) effects describe the changes in the polarization state of light upon interaction with magnetic material. Faraday and Kerr effects are examples of such phenomena that could be simply analyzed using conventional optical spectroscopy methods. Since the arrangement of spins contribute to such MO effects in magnetic materials, even a small change in their order could induce change in the polarization state of interacting light. Compared to ferromagnets, antiferromagnets having opposite magnetic sublattices allow manipulation of all polarization orientation. 2D van der Waals antiferromagnets are promising material platform for spintronic and quantum information technology with the control of their dimensions down to an atomic layer thickness. However, nanostructural counterparts of such 2D van der Waals antiferromagnets are rarely explored for their magnetic properties. We argue that the abrupt change in the spin arrangement with the presence of sharp edges allow nano-magnetic structures to exhibit different MO effect compared to bulk by using NiPS3 as a prototype since the photoluminescence here is correlated to spin.