An effective spin model on the honeycomb lattice for the description of magnetic properties in two-dimensional Fe₃GeTe₂

Fe3GeTe2 attracts significant attention due to technological perspectives of realizing room temperature ferromagnetism in two-dimensional materials. Here we show that due to structural peculiarities of the Fe3GeTe2 monolayer, short distance between the neighboring iron atoms induces a strong exchange coupling. This strong coupling allows us to consider them as an effective cluster with a magnetic moment similar to 5 mu(B), giving rise to a simplified spin model on a bipartite honeycomb lattice with the reduced number of long-range interactions. The simplified model perfectly reproduces the results of the conventional spin model, but allows for a more tractable description of the magnetic properties of Fe3GeTe2, which is important, e.g., for large-scale simulations. Also, we discuss the role of biaxial strain in the stabilization of ferromagnetic ordering in Fe3GeTe2.