Large and tunable magnetoresistance in van der Waals Ferromagnet/Semiconductor junctions

Abstract

Magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) with conventional bulk ferromagnets separated by a nonmagnetic insulating layer are key building blocks in spintronics for magnetic sensors and memory. A radically different approach of using atomically-thin van der Waals (vdW) materials in MTJs is expected to boost their figure of merit, the tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR), while relaxing the lattice-matching requirements from the epitaxial growth and supporting high-quality integration of dissimilar materials with atomically-sharp interfaces. We report TMR up to 192% at 10 K in all-vdW Fe3GeTe2/GaSe/Fe3GeTe2 MTJs. Remarkably, instead of the usual insulating spacer, this large TMR is realized with a vdW semiconductor GaSe. Integration of two-dimensional ferromagnets in semiconductor-based vdW junctions offers gate-tunability, bias dependence, magnetic proximity effects, and spin-dependent optical-selection rules. We demonstrate that not just the magnitude, but also the TMR sign is tuned by the applied bias or the semiconductor thickness, enabling modulation of highly spin-polarized carriers in vdW semiconductors.

References in corpus (8)

• Electrical Detection of Spin Transport in Lateral Ferromagnet-Semiconductor Devices
• Van der Waals heterostructures for spintronics and opto-spintronics
• Quantitative simulation of temperature dependent magnetization dynamics and equilibrium properties of elemental ferromagnets
• Strong enhancement of photoresponsivity with shrinking the electrodes spacing in few layer GaSe photodetectors
• Efficient spin injection and giant magnetoresistance in Fe/MoS${}_2$/Fe junctions
• Reversal of spin polarization in Fe/GaAs (001) driven by resonant surface states: First-principles calculations
• Tunable magnetic textures in spin valves: From spintronics to Majorana bound states
• Bias dependent inversion of tunneling magnetoresistance in Fe/GaAs/Fe tunnel junctions

Cited by in corpus (5)

• All van der Waals three-terminal SOT-MRAM realized by topological ferromagnet Fe3GeTe2
• Unconventional bias-dependent tunneling magnetoresistance in van der Waals ferromagnetic/semiconductor heterojunctions
• Artificially creating emergent interfacial antiferromagnetism and its manipulation in a magnetic van-der-Waals heterostructure
• Bias voltage controlled inversions of tunneling magnetoresistance in van der Waals heterostructures Fe3GaTe2/hBN/Fe3GaTe2
• Bias Voltage Driven Tunneling Magnetoresistance Polarity Reversal in 2D Stripy Antiferromagnet CrOCl