Giant tunneling magnetoresistance in spin-filter van der Waals heterostructures
Tiancheng Song, Xinghan Cai, Matisse Wei-Yuan Tu, Xiaoou Zhang, Bevin Huang, Nathan P. Wilson, Kyle L. Seyler, Lin Zhu, Takashi Taniguchi, Kenji Watanabe, Michael A. McGuire, David Cobden, Di Xiao, Wang Yao, Xiaodong Xu
Abstract
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 CrI 3 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