Stable excitons in semiconductor monolayers such as transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) enable and motivate fundamental research as well as the development of room-temperature optoelectronics applications. The newly discovered layered magnetic materials present a unique opportunity to integrate optical functionalities with magnetism. We predict that a large class of antiferromagnetic semiconducting monolayers of the $M\mathrm{P}X{}_3$ family exhibit giant excitonic binding energies, making them suitable platforms for magneto-optical investigations and optospintronics applications. Indeed, our investigations, based on first-principles methods combined with an effective-model Bethe-Salpeter solver, show that excitons in bare Neel-${\mathrm{MnPS}}_3$ are bound by more than 1 eV, which is twice the excitonic energies in TMDCs. In addition, the antiferromagnetic ordering of monolayer samples can be inferred indirectly using different polarization of light.

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• Electrical properties
• Excitons
• First-principles calculations
• Magnetic order
• Optoelectronics