Magnetic van der Waals materials: Synthesis, structure, magnetism, and their potential applications

As the family of magnetic materials is rapidly growing, two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) magnets have attracted increasing attention as a platform to explore fundamental physical problems of magnetism and their potential applications. This paper reviews the recent progress on emergent vdW magnetic compounds and their potential applications in devices. First, we summarize the current vdW magnetic materials and their synthetic methods. Then, we focus on their structure and the modulation of magnetic properties by analyzing the representative vdW magnetic materials with different magnetic structures. In addition, we pay attention to the heterostructures of vdW magnetic materials, which are expected to produce revolutionary applications of magnetism-related devices. To motivate the researchers in this area, we finally provide the challenges and outlook on 2D vdW magnetism.