One-Pot Synthesis Enables Magnetic Coupled Cr₂Te₃/MnTe/Cr₂Te₃ Integrated Heterojunction Nanorods

Magnetic heterostructures offer great promise in spintronic devices due to their unique magnetic properties, such as exchange bias effect, topological superconductivity, and magneto-resistance. Although various magnetic heterostructures including core/shell, multilayer, and van der Waals systems have been fabricated recently, the construction of perfect heterointerfaces usually rely on complicated and high-cost fabrication methods such as molecular-beam epitaxy; surprisingly, few one-dimensional (1D) bimagnetic heterojunctions, which provide multidegrees of freedom to modulate magnetic properties via magnetic anisotropy and interface coupling, have been fabricated to date. Here we report a one-pot solution-based method for the synthesis of ferromagnetic/antiferromagnetic/ferromagnetic heterojunction nanorods with excellent heterointerfaces in the case of Cr₂Te₃/MnTe/Cr₂Te₃. The precise control of homogeneous nucleation of MnTe and heterogeneous nucleation of Cr₂Te₃ is a key factor in synthesizing this heterostructure. The resulting 1D bimagnetic heterojunction nanorods exhibit high coercivity of 5.8 kOe and exchange bias of 892.5 Oe achieved by the magnetic MnTe/Cr₂Te₃ interface coupling.