Enhancement of Curie temperature in ferromagnetic insulator-topological insulator heterostructures

Abstract We theoretically analyze the topological insulator (TI) surface state mediated interactions between local moments in a proximate 2D ferromagnetic insulator (FMI) motivated by recent experiments that show a significant increase in the Curie temperature T c of FMI-TI heterostructures. Such interactions have been investigated earlier with a focus on dilute magnetic dopants in TIs. Our problem involves a dense set of moments for which we find that the short range Bloembergen–Rowland interaction, arising from virtual particle-hole transitions between the valence and conduction bands, dominates over the oscillatory Ruderman–Kittel–Kasuya–Yosida (RKKY) interaction. We show that the T c enhancement is proportional to the Van Vleck susceptibility and that the spin-momentum locking of surface states leads to out-of-plane ferromagnetic order in the FMI. We investigate how the hybridization between top and bottom surfaces in a thin TI film impacts T c enhancement, and show how our results can help understand recent experiments on atomically thin Cr 2 Te 3 -(Bi,Sb) 2 Te 3 . Our results advance the understanding of magnetic interactions relevant for TI-based spintronic and magnonic devices.