journal article·2025-06

Rapid growth of inch-sized lanthanide oxychloride single crystals

Zhuofeng Shi, Wei Guo, Saiyu Bu, Lingmiao Ma, Zhaoning Hu, Yaqi Zhu, Haotian Wu, Xiaohui Chen, Xiaodong Zhang, Kostya S. Novoselov, Boyang Mao, Ning Kang, Li Lin

Nature Materials· Volume 24· Issue 6
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Abstract

The layered lanthanide oxychloride (LnOCl) family, featuring a low equivalent oxide thickness, high breakdown field and magnetic ordering properties, holds great promise for next-generation van der Waals devices. However, the exploitation of LnOCl materials has been hindered by a lack of reliable methods for growing their single-crystalline phases. Here we achieved the growth of inch-sized bulk LnOCl single crystals and single-crystalline thin films with thickness down to the monolayer in a few hours. The monolayer LnOCl exhibits ultralow equivalent oxide thicknesses, for instance, LaOCl and SmOCl have values of 0.25 and 0.34, respectively. Furthermore, using LnOCl as a dielectric in graphene devices, we demonstrate wafer-scale enhancement of carrier mobility and a well-developed quantum Hall effect. The induced strong magnetic proximity effect by SmOCl and DyOCl enables efficient interfacial charge transfer with magnetic exchange coupling This work provides a general strategy for synthesizing large-sized single-crystalline layered materials, enriching the library of ultralow-equivalent-oxide-thickness dielectric materials, and two-dimensional magnetic materials with induced strong magnetic proximity effect.
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Research context

OpenAlex topics: Luminescence Properties of Advanced Materials · Photonic Crystals and Applications · Photorefractive and Nonlinear Optics

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