Spin transport of half-metal Mn₂X₃ with high Curie temperature: An ideal giant magnetoresistance device from electrical and thermal drives

Abstract

Currently, magnetic storage devices are encountering the problem of achieving lightweight and high integration in mobile computing devices during the information age. As a result, there is a growing urgency for two-dimensional half-metallic materials with a high Curie temperature (T_C). This study presents a theoretical investigation of the fundamental electromagnetic properties of the monolayer hexagonal lattice of Mn₂X₃ (X = S, Se, Te). Additionally, the potential application of Mn₂X₃ as magneto-resistive components is explored. All three of them fall into the category of ferromagnetic half-metals. In particular, the Monte Carlo simulations indicate that the T_C of Mn₂S₃ reachs 381 K, noticeably greater than room temperature. These findings present notable advantages for the application of Mn₂S₃ in spintronic devices. Hence, a prominent spin filtering effect is apparent when employing non-equilibrium Green’s function simulations to examine the transport parameters. The resulting current magnitude is approximately 2 × 10⁴ nA, while the peak gigantic magnetoresistance exhibits a substantial value of 8.36 × 10¹⁶ %. It is noteworthy that the device demonstrates a substantial spin Seebeck effect when the temperature differential between the electrodes is modified. In brief, Mn₂X₃ exhibits outstanding features as a high T_C half-metal, exhibiting exceptional capabilities in electrical and thermal drives spin transport. Therefore, it holds great potential for usage in spintronics applications.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

half-metals / Mn₂X₃ / high Curie temperature / electrical and thermal GMR

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Declarations

The authors declare that they have no competing interests and there are no conflicts.

Electronic supplementary materials

The online version contains supplementary materials available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-023-1367-2 and https://journal.hep.com.cn/fop/EN/10.1007/s11467-023-1367-2.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11704291 and 12174296), the Hubei Province Key Laboratory of Systems Science in Metallurgical Process of Wuhan University of Science and Technology (Grant Nos. Y202101 and Y202208), the Scientific research project of Education Department of Hubei Province (Grant No. 2022024), the Postgraduate Scientific Research Innovation Project of Hunan Province (Grant No. QL20230006), and the High-Performance Computing Center of Wuhan University of Science and Technology. S. C. Z. also acknowledges the support from China Scholarship Council.

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