Giant tunneling magnetoresistance in spin-filter van der Waals heterostructures
By Tiancheng Song, Xinghan Cai, M. Tu, Xiaoou Zhang, Bevin Huang, Nathan P. Wilson, K. Seyler, Lin Zhu, Takashi Taniguchi, Kenji Watanabe and 5 more. Science, 2018
1,117 citations recorded by the source corpus.
An intrinsic magnetic tunnel junction An electrical current running through two stacked magnetic layers is larger if their magnetizations point in the same direction than if they point in opposite directions. These so-called magnetic tunnel junctions, used in electronics, must be carefully engineered. Two groups now show that high magnetoresistance intrinsically occurs in samples of the layered material CrI3 sandwiched between graphite contacts. By varying the number of layers in the samples, Klein et al. and Song et al. found that the electrical current running perpendicular to the layers was largest in high magnetic fields and smallest near zero field. This observation is consistent with adjacent layers naturally having opposite magnetizations, which align parallel to each other in high magnetic fields. Science, this issue p. 1218, p. 1214 The atomic layers of the material CrI3 act as spin filters in graphite/CrI3/graphite junctions. Magnetic multilayer devices that exploit magnetoresistance are the backbone of magnetic sensing and data storage technologies. Here, we report multiple-spin-filter magnetic tunnel junctions (sf-MTJs) based on van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures in which atomically thin chromium triiodide (CrI3) acts as a spin-filter tunnel barrier sandwiched between graphene contacts. We demonstrate tunneling magnetoresistance that is drastically enhanced with increasing CrI3 layer thickness, reaching a record 19,000% for magnetic multilayer structures using four-layer sf-MTJs at low temperatures. Using magnetic circular dichroism measurements, we attribute these effects to the intrinsic layer-by-layer antiferromagnetic ordering of the atomically thin CrI3. Our work reveals the possibility to push magnetic information storage to the atomically thin limit and highlights CrI3 as a superlative magnetic tunnel barrier for vdW heterostructure spintronic devices.
Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4595a7708758020af64b05447b00358c74f4dbf2
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Citations in the corpus
- Skyrmion-electronics: writing, deleting, reading and processing magnetic skyrmions toward spintronic applications (2019, background): “These studies on 2D magnets opened a whole new door toward 2D heterostructure-based spintronics, as a result, there appeared significant following interests and efforts revealing the possibility of such devices by demonstrating the magnetoresistance effect in 2D magnets [308], gate-tunable roomtempe”
- Magnon Transport in Quasi-Two-Dimensional van der Waals Antiferromagnets (2019, background): “For example, giant tunneling magnetoresistance in bilayer CrI3 has been demonstrated [17-19], which is much higher compared to conventional single-crystalline-MgO barrier based ferromagnetic tunneling junctions [20,21].”
- Two-dimensional magnetic crystals and emergent heterostructure devices (2019, positive): “5, C and D), with maximal magnetoresistance amounting to 19,000% at 2 K (125), 550% at 300 mK (126), 10,000% at 10 K (49), and 1,000,000% at 1.”
- Stacking-Dependent Magnetism in Bilayer CrI3. (2018, neutral): “Nature Nanotechnology 2018, [10] Song, T.”
- Probing and controlling magnetic states in 2D layered magnetic materials (2019, positive): “…values Nature reviews | Physics R e v i e w s of spin-filter TMR have also been observed for the same kind of devices under in-plane magnetic fields 121,122 , which cause a continuous rotation of spins from the out-of-plane alignment in the AF state at zero field to parallel in-plane alignment at…”
- Room temperature ferromagnetism in ultra-thin van der Waals crystals of 1T-CrTe2 (2020, background): “For example, magnetoresistance in spin-filtered magnetic vdW heterojunctions was manifested to be as high as 19,000%, far superior to that of conventionally grown magnetic thin films [9].”