Fig. 3: Magnetic ground state in Cr_1.25Te₂.

a Side view of the Cr atoms arrangement in the 2 × 2 supercell (dashed lines). Light blue Cr-atoms belong to the CrTe₂ layers. Their magnetic moments are aligned ferromagnetically out-of-plane with a 17° canting of the Cr atoms sitting on top of the Cr intercalated within the CrTe₂ van der Waals gap (purple color). The magnetic moment of the intercalated atom is nearly transverse to the out-of-plane direction with a canting of 83°. The nearest-neighbors and the next-nearest-neighbors exchange interactions J_i considered in this work are also shown. b Top view of the crystal structure with the unit cell (dashed lines) and (c) in-plane spin component of the intercalated Cr resulting in three equivalent minima of the magnetic ground state. d Field dependent magnetization curves measured at different sample temperatures. Magnetic field was applied out of the plane of the sample. The inset shows an hysteresis acquired with smaller magnetic field steps on a different crystal piece of the same batch. We observed the same trend consistently across the various samples we probed, with only a narrow dispersion in the coercive fields (20−40 mT) and in the remanence (7−18%). e Magnetization as a function of temperature for an out-of-plane applied field of 3 mT and (f) associated sketches of the magnetization mechanism.