Abstract
Magnetic properties of materials ranging from conventional ferromagnetic metals to strongly correlated materials such as cuprates originate from Coulomb exchange interactions. The existence of alternate mechanisms for magnetism that could naturally facilitate electrical control has been discussed theoretically 1–7, but an experimental demonstration 8 in an extended system has been missing. Here we investigate MoSe2/WS2 van der Waals heterostructures in the vicinity of Mott insulator states of electrons forming a frustrated triangular lattice and observe direct evidence of magnetic correlations originating from a kinetic mechanism. By directly measuring electronic magnetization through the strength of the polarization-selective attractive polaron resonance 9,10, we find that when the Mott state is electron-doped, the system exhibits ferromagnetic correlations in agreement with the Nagaoka mechanism.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 509-513 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Journal | Nature |
| Volume | 623 |
| Issue number | 7987 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 16 2023 |
Funding
We acknowledge discussions with H. Adlong, B. Evrard and L. Fu. This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) under grant no. 200021-204076. I.M. thanks support from the MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 (grant no. PID2020-114626GB-I00) and the Secretaria d’Universitats i Recerca del Departament d’Empresa i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya, co-funded by the European Union Regional Development Fund in the ERDF Operational Program of Catalunya (project QuantumCat, ref. 001-P-001644). E.D. acknowledges support from the ARO (grant no. W911NF-20-1-0163). K.W. and T.T. acknowledge support from the JSPS KAKENHI (grant nos 20H00354, 21H05233 and 23H02052) and the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI), MEXT, Japan.