Gate-tunable large magnetoresistance in an all-semiconductor spin valve device.

A large spin-dependent and electric field-tunable magnetoresistance of a two-dimensional electron system is a key ingredient for the realization of many novel concepts for spin-based electronic devices. The low magnetoresistance observed during the last few decades in devices with lateral semiconducting transport channels between ferromagnetic source and drain contacts has been the main obstacle for realizing spin field effect transistor proposals. Here, we show both a large two-terminal magnetoresistance in a lateral spin valve device with a two-dimensional channel, with up to 80% resistance change, and tunability of the magnetoresistance by an electric gate. The enhanced magnetoresistance is due to finite electric field effects at the contact interface, which boost spin-to-charge conversion. The gating scheme that we use is based on switching between uni- and bidirectional spin diffusion, without resorting to spin-orbit coupling. Therefore, it can also be employed in materials with low spin-orbit coupling.

Electrical spin injection into high mobility 2D systems.

We report on spin injection into a high mobility 2D electron system confined at an (Al,Ga)As/GaAs interface, using (Ga,Mn)As Esaki diode contacts as spin aligners. We measured a clear nonlocal spin valve signal, which varies nonmonotonically with the applied bias voltage. The magnitude of the signal cannot be described by the standard spin drift-diffusion model, because at maximum this would require the spin polarization of the injected current to be much larger than 100%, which is unphysical. A strong correlation of the spin signal with contact width and electron mean free path suggests that ballistic transport in the 2D region below ferromagnetic contacts should be taken into account to fully describe the results.