Switching on and off the spin polarization of the conduction band in antiferromagnetic bilayer transistors

Abstract

Antiferromagnetic conductors with suitably broken spatial symmetries host spin-polarized bands, which lead to transport phenomena commonly observed in metallic ferromagnets. In bulk materials, it is the given crystalline structure that determines whether symmetries are broken and spin-polarized bands are present. Here we demonstrate experimentally that double-gate transistors realized on bilayers of van der Waals antiferromagnetic semiconductor CrPS4 allow the relevant symmetry to be controlled by a perpendicular electric displacement field. Such a level of control enables the spin-polarization of the conduction band to be switched on and off. Because conduction band states with opposite spin-polarizations are hosted in the different layers and are spatially separated, these devices also give control over the magnetization of the electrons that are accumulated electrostatically. Our experiments show that double-gated CrPS4 transistors provide a viable platform to create gate-induced conductors with near unity spin polarization at the Fermi level, as well as devices with a full electrostatic control of the total magnetization of the system.

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Spin-Polarized Antiferromagnetic Spintronics
• Ferroelectric Antiferromagnetic Lifting of Spin-Valley Degeneracy
• Optical Spin Sensing and Metamagnetic Phase Control in the 2D Van der Waals Magnet Yb3+-Doped CrPS4
• Momentum-Resolved Electronic Structure and Orbital Hybridization in the Layered Antiferromagnet CrPS${}_4$
• Tunable linear and nonlinear anomalous Hall transport in two-dimensional CrPS${}_4$
• Persistence of large and gate-tunable anisotropic magnetoresistance in an atomically thin antiferromagnet