Ferromagnetism in exfoliated tungsten disulfide nanosheets

Two-dimensional-layered transition metal dichalcogenides nanosheets have attracted tremendous attention for their promising applications in spintronics because the atomic-thick nanosheets can not only enhance the intrinsic properties of their bulk counterparts, but also give birth to new promising properties. In this paper, ultrathin tungsten disulfide (WS 2 ) nanosheets were gotten by liquid exfoliation route from its bulk form using dimethylformamide (DMF). Compared to the antiferromagnetism bulk WS 2 , ultrathin WS 2 nanosheets show intrinsic room-temperature ferromagnetism (FM) with the maximized saturation magnetization of 0.004 emu/g at 10 K, where the appearance of FM in the nanosheets is partly due to the presence of zigzag edges in the magnetic ground state at the grain boundaries.