Magnetization dependent tunneling conductance of ferromagnetic barriers.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34795253.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-26973-7 and PMC identifier 8602639.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Recent experiments on van der Waals antiferromagnets have shown that measuring the temperature (T) and magnetic field (H) dependence of the conductance allows their magnetic phase diagram to be mapped. Similarly, experiments on ferromagnetic CrBr<sub>3</sub> barriers enabled the Curie temperature to be determined at H = 0, but a precise interpretation of the magnetoconductance data at H ≠ 0 is conceptually more complex, because at finite H there is no well-defined phase boundary. Here we perform systematic transport measurements on CrBr<sub>3</sub> barriers and show that the tunneling magnetoconductance depends on H and T exclusively through the magnetization M(H, T) over the entire temperature range investigated. The phenomenon is reproduced by the spin-dependent Fowler-Nordheim model for tunneling, and is a direct manifestation of the spin splitting of the CrBr<sub>3</sub> conduction band. Our analysis unveils a new approach to probe quantitatively different properties of atomically thin ferromagnetic insulators related to their magnetization by performing simple conductance measurements.