Highly sensitive spin-flop transition in antiferromagnetic van der Waals material M P S 3 ( M = Ni and Mn)

Recent developments in two-dimensional (2D) magnetism have motivated the search for van der Waals (vdW) magnetic materials to explore magnetic phenomena in the 2D limit. Metal thiophosphates, $M\mathrm{P}{X}_{3}$, are a class of magnetic vdW materials with antiferromagnetic ordering persisting down to the atomically thin limit. The magnetism in this material family has been found to be highly dependent on the choice of transition metal $M$. In this work, we have synthesized the intermediate compounds ${\mathrm{Ni}}_{1\text{\ensuremath{-}}x}{\mathrm{Mn}}_{x}\mathrm{P}{\mathrm{S}}_{3}$ ($0\ensuremath{\le}x\ensuremath{\le}1$) and investigated their magnetic properties. Our study reveals that the variation of Ni and Mn content in ${\mathrm{Ni}}_{1\text{\ensuremath{-}}x}{\mathrm{Mn}}_{x}\mathrm{P}{\mathrm{S}}_{3}$ can efficiently tune the spin-flop transition, likely due to the modulation of the magnetic anisotropy. Such effective tuning offers a promising candidate to engineer 2D magnetism for future device applications.