Manipulating a quantum state via electrostatic gating has been of great importance for many model systems in nanoelectronics. Until now, however, controlling the electron spins or, more specifically, the magnetism of a system by electric-field tuning has proven challenging. Recently, atomically thin magnetic semiconductors have attracted significant attention due to their emerging new physical phenomena. However, many issues are yet to be resolved to convincingly demonstrate gate-controllable magnetism in these two-dimensional materials. Here, we show that, via electrostatic gating, a strong field effect can be observed in devices based on few-layered ferromagnetic semiconducting CrGeTe. At different gate doping, micro-area Kerr measurements in the studied devices demonstrate bipolar tunable magnetization loops below the Curie temperature, which is tentatively attributed to the moment rebalance in the spin-polarized band structure. Our findings of electric-field-controlled magnetism in van der Waals magnets show possibilities for potential applications in new-generation magnetic memory storage, sensors and spintronics.

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Laser-induced magnetization dynamics is quantitatively investigated in a van der Waals ferromagnetic Cr2Ge2Te6 nanoflake by means of time-resolved Faraday rotation. Under ferromagnetic resonance conditions, the angular dependence of spin precession dynamics gives rise to a perpendicular magnetic anisotropy with an effective field of 125 ± 8 mT. We further determine the field dependence of the effective damping coefficient, which is dominated by the inhomogeneous broadening of magnetic anisotropy in the regime of a small magnetic field while it diminishes to an intrinsic value of 0.006 ± 0.002 at high fields.

Optically detected nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) with micrometer resolution is demonstrated in n-GaAs using an on-chip microcoil. To trace the Overhauser field, the electron Larmor frequency is monitored via time-resolved magneto-optical Kerr rotation. Sweeping the frequency of the rf magnetic field induced by an on-chip microscale current loop, nuclear spin depolarization is achieved for each isotope species. The experimental data indicate an impact of a local quadrupole field, most likely caused by ionized donors, on the amplitude and linewidth of the NMR spectrum. By applying rf pulse sequences, the Rabi oscillation of A75s nuclear spins is obtained with an effective dephasing time of ∼200 μs.

The dynamics of optically detected nuclear magnetic resonance is studied in n-GaAs via time-resolved Kerr rotation using an on-chip microcoil for rf field generation. Both optically allowed and optically forbidden NMR are observed with a dynamics controlled by the interplay between dynamic nuclear polarization via hyperfine interaction with optically generated spin-polarized electrons and nuclear spin depolarization due to magnetic resonance absorption. Comparing the characteristic nuclear spin relaxation rate obtained in experiment with master equation simulations, the underlying nuclear spin depolarization mechanism for each resonance is extracted.