Summary

In the last decade, there has been immense interest in exploring two dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene as it has been a model system to explore physics confined in 2D and can used for a multitude of device applications. In this same category of van der Waals layered materials, transition metal dichalcogenides (or TMDs), have emerged as an ideal playground for the investigation of exotic electronic phases due to greatly enhanced many-body interactions attributed to its large spin-orbit coupling and absence of inversion symmetry in the single layer limit. Many of these TMDs have the potential to host magnetic order which often coexist with other electronic states such as superconductivity and charge density wave order. With reduced dimensionality, much of the physics related to strong correlations can be observed and studied in more detail.

Investigating such 2D materials requires spectroscopic tools or technique with high sensitivity as well as pristine and defect-free crystals, or in some cases, having precisely controlled defect density. While these 2D materials can be exfoliated by a simple method using scotch tape, atomic level investigations demand crystals of high purity that can be measured in a clean environment.

The ultimate goal of MAGTMD project is to demonstrate that the enhanced electronic correlations in TMD lead to different expressions of magnetism in the 2D limit. The principal tool of investigation is scanning tunneling microscopy at ultra-low temperatures which can provide atomic level insights on the electronic density of states of the material spatially mapped onto its 2D lattice. With an external magnetic field applied to the sample surface, the impact of magnetic order in the ground state electronic properties can be studied. For this purpose, high crystallinity 2D materials will be prepared by molecular beam epitaxy in an ultrahigh vacuum environment. A key component of MAGTMD is the modification of ground state properties by modulating the charge carrier density at the fermi level to access rich electronic phases in proximity to a quantum critical point.