Gigantic tunneling magnetoresistance in magnetic Weyl semimetal tunnel junctions

Phys Rev B. 2021 Jul 15;104(4):10.1103/physrevb.104.l041401. doi: 10.1103/physrevb.104.l041401.

Abstract

We investigate the tunneling magnetoresistance in magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) comprised of Weyl semimetal contacts. We show that chirality-magnetization locking leads to a gigantic tunneling magnetoresistance ratio, an effect that does not rely on spin filtering by the tunnel barrier. Our results indicate that the conductance in the anti-parallel configuration is more sensitive to magnetization fluctations than in MTJs with normal ferromagnets, and predicts a TMR as large as 104 % when realistic magnetization fluctuations are accounted for. In addition, we show that the Fermi arc states give rise to a non-monotonic dependence of conductance on the misalignment angle between the magnetizations of the two contacts.

Keywords: 71.10.Pm; 73.22.-f; 73.63.-b.