Colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) is an extraordinary enhancement of the electric conductivity in the presence of a magnetic field. It is conventionally associated with a field-induced spin polarization, which drastically reduces spin scattering and thus electric resistance. However, ferrimagnetic Mn3Si2Te6 is an intriguing exception to this rule: it exhibits a 7-order-of-magnitude reduction in ab-plane resistivity with a 13-Tesla anisotropy field which occur only when a magnetic polarization is avoided [1]. Here we report an exotic quantum state that is driven by ab-plane chiral orbital currents (COC) flowing along edges of MnTe6 octahedra. The c-axis orbital moments of ab-plane COC couple to the ferrimagnetic Mn spins to drastically increase the ab-plane conductivity (CMR) when an external magnetic field is aligned along the magnetic hard c-axis. Both the COC state and its CMR are extraordinarily susceptible to small DC currents exceeding a critical threshold, and a hallmark of this COC state is an exotic time-dependent, bistable switching mimicking a first-order melting transition. The control of the COC-enabled CMR and bistable switching offers a fundamentally new paradigm for quantum technologies.
@article{arxiv.2209.08672,
title = {Control of chiral orbital currents in a colossal magnetoresistance material},
author = {Yu Zhang and Yifei Ni and Hengdi Zhao and Sami Hakani and Feng Ye and Lance DeLong and Itamar Kimchi and Gang Cao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.08672},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
5 figures. The final version of this paper, which is more updated than this version, is to be published in Nature