Spintronics and Correlation Effects in Two-Dimensional Magnetic Materials: From FenGeTe2 to p-Wave Magnets

The rapid discovery of two-dimensional (2D) magnetic materials has unveiled a wealth of complex magnetic orders and exciting opportunities for spintronics. In this talk, I will briefly introduce several such materials [1], focusing in particular on the FenGeTe2 (n = 3, 4, 5) family of metallic ferromagnets and on NiI2, a recently reported p-wave magnet [2]. Using density functional theory (DFT) combined with the non-equilibrium Green’s function (NEGF) formalism, I will discuss their transport properties in tunnel magnetic junction setups. I will first demonstrate that FenGeTe2 exhibits nearly half-metallic conductance along the out-of-plane direction, thus leading to a large tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) [3, 4]. Then, I will show how the concept of TMR can be extended from conventional ferromagnets to p-wave magnets. Finally, I will address the role of correlation effects in transport by introducing a framework that combines DFT, Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT), and NEGF. Within this framework, we show that devices based on FenGeTe2 under finite bias can enter a novel “hot-electron correlated” regime driven by electron scattering processes [5] —characterized by incoherent features in both the excitation spectrum and conductance—making it experimentally accessible.

[1] F. Orlando, A. Droghetti, et al., arXiv:2509.20226
[2] Q. Song, S. Stavrić, P. Barone, A. Droghetti, et al., Nature 642 (8066), 64-70 (2025).
[3] A. Halder, D. Nell, A. Sihi, A. Bajaj, S. Sanvito, and A. Droghetti, Nano Lett. 24, 9221 (2024).
[4] A. Halder, D. Nell, A. Bajaj, S. Sanvito, and A. Droghetti, arXiv:2509.06823
[5] D. Nell, S. Sanvito, and A. Droghetti, arXiv:2510.24322