Cavity control of multiferroic order in single-layer NiI₂

Controlling materials through their interactions with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations is an emergent frontier in material engineering. Although recent experiments have demonstrated dark cavity effects for electronic material phases, like superconductivity, ferroelectricity and charge density waves, a smoking gun experiment for magnetic systems is lacking. Largely, this comes from the focus on phase transitions, where a large critical light-matter coupling is needed to observe cavity modifications. Here, we propose spiral magnets, where even a small cavity-mediated change in magnetic interactions is reflected in a change of the spiral wavelength, as a promising platform to observe cavity effects. We focus on the single-layer multiferroic NiI₂, interacting with electric field fluctuations from surface phonon polaritons of the paraelectric substrate SrTiO₃. With decreasing substrate-material distance, the ratio of nearest and third-nearest neighbor exchange interactions reduces, leading to an increase of the spiral wavelength and an eventual transition into a ferromagnetic state. Our work identifies a realistic platform to observe cavity vacuum renormalization effects in magnetic systems.