Abstract
Magnetic van der Waals (vdW) materials have emerged as promising candidates for spintronics applications, especially after the recent discovery of intrinsic ferromagnetism in monolayer vdW materials. There has been a critical need for tunable ferromagnetic vdW materials beyond room temperature. Here, we report a real-space imaging study of itinerant ferromagnet Fe3GeTe2 and the enhancement of its Curie temperature well above ambient temperature. We find that the magnetic long-range order in Fe3GeTe2 is characterized by an unconventional out-of-plane stripe-domain phase. In Fe3GeTe2 microstructures patterned by a focused ion beam, the out-of-plane stripe domain phase undergoes a surprising transition at 230 K to an in-plane vortex phase that persists beyond room temperature. The discovery of tunable ferromagnetism in Fe3GeTe2 materials opens up vast opportunities for utilizing vdW magnets in room-temperature spintronics devices.