Fig. 3. Thickness-dependent magnetic anisotropy of 1T-CrTe₂ crystals grown on SiO₂/Si substrate.

a–d Magnetic hysteresis loops for 1T-CrTe₂ flakes with a thickness of ~40.0 nm (a, b) and ~3.0 nm (c, d) under the magnetic field parallel (a, c) and vertical (b, d) to the c-axis of the crystal, respectively. The corresponding topographies and optical contrast images are displayed in Supplementary Fig. 9. e Remanence and coercive force at zero field for 1T-CrTe₂ samples of various thicknesses. The magnetic hysteresis loops at 100 K was used to extract the value of remanence and coercive force. The remanence is normalized by the sample area. f DFT-calculated magnetic anisotropy energy (MAE) as a function of initial on-site Coulomb potential (U) for monolayer and bulk 1T-CrTe₂, respectively. The MAE (E_MAE) is defined as E_MAE = E_out – E_in, in which E_out and E_in are the calculated total energies per unit cell with easy axis along with the directions of out-of-plane and in-plane, respectively.