Fluorine Intercalated Graphene: Formation of a 2D Spin Lattice through Pseudoatomization

Abstract

A suspended layer made up of ferromagnetically ordered spins could be created between two mono/multilayer graphene through intercalation. Stability and electronic structure studies show that, when fluorine molecules are intercalated between two mono/multilayer graphene, their bonds get stretched enough (∼ 1.9−2.0 Å) to weaken their molecular singlet eigenstate. Geometrically, these stretched molecules form a pseudoatomized fluorine layer by maintaining a van der Waals separation of ∼ 2.6 Å from the adjacent carbon layers. As there is a significant charge transfer from the adjacent carbon layers to the fluorine layers, a mixture of triplet and doublet states stabilize to induce local spin-moments at each fluorine sites and in turn form a suspended 2D spin lattice. The spins of this lattice align ferromagnetically with nearest neighbour coupling strength as large as ∼ 100 meV. Our finite temperature ab initio molecular dynamics study reveals that the intercalated system can be stabilized up to a temperature of 100 K with an average magnetic moment of ∼ 0.6 µB/F. However, if the graphene layers can be held fixed, the room temperature stability of such a system is feasible.