Study of the orbital moment in van der Waals insulator VBr3

The proposal’s target is to measure high magnetic field X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) of vanadium (V) at K-edge in two-dimensional van der Waals (vdW) antiferromagnet (AFM) VBr3 to quantitatively probe the orbital occupation in a polarized state. Confirmation of a non-zero orbital moment in VBr3 is crucial for understanding the origin of strong magnetocrystalline anisotropy. The XMCD signal at the V K-edge (not directly involving d-bands) originates from a spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and non-zero OM in the final p-band and possible hybridization between p and d-bands. Therefore, one might expect a robust K-edge XMCD signal if OM in VBr3 is not quenched, making this technique well-suited for our study.