Spontaneous nonreciprocal transport in a gate-tunable ferromagnetic Rashba 2-dimensional electron gas

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of spontaneous nonreciprocal transport in gate-tunable ferromagnetic Rashba 2DEGs at SrTiO3 interfaces, revealing new spintronic phenomena driven by inversion symmetry breaking and spin-orbit coupling.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental demonstration of nonreciprocal transport in ferromagnetic Rashba 2DEGs and shows active gate control of this effect and related ferromagnetic signatures.

Findings

Observation of spontaneous nonreciprocal transport without external magnetic field

Gate-tunable anomalous Hall effect with sign reversal

Strong correlation between Fermi level position and Berry curvature effects

Abstract

The broken inversion symmetry at interfaces of complex oxides gives rise to emergent phenomena, including ferromagnetism and Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC), which profoundly influence the electronic structure by entangling spin and momentum. While the interplay between Rashba SOC and ferromagnetism is theoretically intriguing, its experimental manifestations remain largely unexplored. Here, we demonstrate that ferromagnetic 2DEGs at SrTiO$_3$-based interfaces exhibit spontaneous nonreciprocal transport - a distinctive hallmark of Rashba ferromagnets - even in the absence of an external magnetic field. This nonreciprocal response, along with clear signatures of ferromagnetism such as anisotropic magnetoresistance and the anomalous Hall effect (AHE), is strongly tunable by gate voltage. Remarkably, the AHE not only varies in amplitude but even reverses sign, reflecting a subtle interplay between Fermi level position and Berry curvature distribution. These results establish SrTiO$_3$ 2DEGs as a model platform for studying Rashba ferromagnetism and demonstrate active control over transport phenomena in time- and inversion-symmetry-broken systems, paving the way for gate-tunable spintronic devices.