Noncollinear frustrated antiferromagnetic Mn3P monolayer and its tunability via a spin degree of freedom

Abstract

Controlling magnetism in two dimensional (2D) materials is valuable to understand the current experimental observations and can guide the further design of functional devices. In this work, a 2D Mn3P monolayer with Mn-based Kagome frameworks is studied based on first principles calculations. The stability of the Mn3P monolayer is confirmed by ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations and phonon dispersions. Possible magnetic configurations with distinguishing chirality are well defined, and the Mn3P monolayer is proved to show 2D noncollinear frustrated antiferromagnetism with positive spin chirality. Besides, the resulting magnetic anisotropic energy (MAE) can be controlled by in-plane-rotation of the spin orientation with a fixed 120° angle between each nearest pair of spins. To evaluate the spin transport properties, the in-plane anomalous Hall conductivity (AHC) is obtained by conducting Wannier interpolation. We find that the value of the AHC can be finely tuned by the explicit spin orientation and the sign of the AHC at the Fermi level can be inverted when the angle of spin orientation transfers from easy (30°) to hard (120°) rotation. Correspondingly, the k-space spin textures show the feature of on–off action owing to the rotation of the spin orientation. Our results provide a strategy for exploiting intrinsic spin orientation to achieve controllable spintronic devices with current synthesis techniques.