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Geometrical enhancement of low-field magnetoresistance in silicon

Nature volume 477, pages 304–307 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

Inhomogeneity-induced magnetoresistance (IMR) reported in some non-magnetic semiconductors1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, particularly silicon1,6,7,8, has generated considerable interest owing to the large magnitude of the effect and its linear field dependence (albeit at high magnetic fields). Various theories implicate9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18 spatial variation of the carrier mobility as being responsible for IMR. Here we show that IMR in lightly doped silicon can be significantly enhanced through hole injection, and then tuned by an applied current to arise at low magnetic fields. In our devices, the ‘inhomogeneity’ is provided by the p–n boundary formed between regions where conduction is dominated by the minority and majority charge carriers (holes and electrons) respectively; application of a magnetic field distorts the current in the boundary region, resulting in large magnetoresistance. Because this is an intrinsically spatial effect, the geometry of the device can be used to enhance IMR further: we designed an IMR device whose room-temperature field sensitivity at low fields was greatly improved, with magnetoresistance reaching 10% at 0.07 T and 100% at 0.2 T, approaching the performance of commercial giant-magnetoresistance devices19,20. The combination of high sensitivity to low magnetic fields and large high-field response should make this device concept attractive to the magnetic-field sensing industry. Moreover, because our device is based on a conventional silicon platform, it should be possible to integrate it with existing silicon devices and so aid the development of silicon-based magnetoelectronics.

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Figure 1: I – V characteristics and Hall coefficient measured in In/SiO 2 /Si/SiO 2 /In at 300 K.
Figure 2: I – V characteristics under magnetic field and the magnetoresistance of sample 20 at 300 K.
Figure 3: Potential (colour scale) and current density (arrows) distributions and the effect of electrode geometry on magnetoresistance.
Figure 4: Magnetoresistance of sample 40 at 300 K.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (grant 2009CB929202) and the National Science Foundation of China (grants 11074141 and U0734001). We used the resources of the Beijing National Center for Electron Microscopy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Laboratory of Advanced Materials, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Caihua Wan, Xiaozhong Zhang, Xili Gao, Jimin Wang & Xinyu Tan

  2. Beijing National Center for Electron Microscopy, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Caihua Wan, Xiaozhong Zhang, Xili Gao, Jimin Wang & Xinyu Tan

Authors
  1. Caihua Wan
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  2. Xiaozhong Zhang
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Contributions

C.H.W. designed research blueprints, did the main experimental measurements and the finite element modelling and wrote the manuscript. X.Z.Z. contributed to project design, experimental and theoretical analysis, manuscript writing and whole project supervision. X.L.G. and J.M.W. contributed to the measurements. X.Y.T. contributed to the modelling work. All authors contributed to result analysis and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Xiaozhong Zhang.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Text and Data 1-7 (see Contents for more details), Supplementary Figures 1-6 with legends and additional references. (PDF 1310 kb)

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Wan, C., Zhang, X., Gao, X. et al. Geometrical enhancement of low-field magnetoresistance in silicon. Nature 477, 304–307 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10375

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