Optomechanics of a light-emitting van der Waals antiferromagnetic membrane

The persistence of a magnetic order in a monolayer of van der Waals magnetic material has been established in 2016, offering the perspective to embed a magnetic degree of freedom in heterostructures made of other bidimensional materials such as graphene or light-emitting transition metal dichalcogenides. The physical properties of van der Waals materials can be easily tuned by perturbations like strain or doping, inviting to the exploration of magnetism in two dimensions and its exploitation in novel ultrathin devices. Our approach is to suspend these magnetic materials forming drum-like resonators in order to investigate the influence of the strain on their magnetic order, combining nano-optomechanics to optical spectroscopies.

Here, we focus on a suspended membrane of NiPS₃, an in-plane zigzag antiferromagnet presenting an intriguing photoluminescence. We investigate the control by strain of its magnetic and light-emitting properties in this sub-picogram mechanical resonator. This work opens to further exploration of magneto-optomechanical coupling in van der Waals magnetic heterostructures.