Magnetoresistance and rectification are two fundamental physical properties of heterojunctions and respectively have wide applications in spintronics devices. Being different from the well known various magnetoresistance effects, here we report a brand new large magnetoresistance that can be regarded as rectification magnetoresistance: the application of a pure small sinusoidal alternating-current to the nonmagnetic Al/Ge Schottky heterojunctions can generate a significant direct-current voltage, and this rectification voltage strongly varies with the external magnetic field. We find that the rectification magnetoresistance in Al/Ge Schottky heterojunctions is as large as 250% at room temperature, which is greatly enhanced as compared with the conventional magnetoresistance of 70%. The findings of rectification magnetoresistance open the way to the new nonmagnetic Ge-based spintronics devices of large rectification magnetoresistance at ambient temperature under the alternating-current due to the simultaneous implementation of the rectification and magnetoresistance in the same devices.
@article{arxiv.1505.06544,
title = {Large rectification magnetoresistance in nonmagnetic Al/Ge/Al heterojunctions},
author = {Kun Zhang and Huan-huan Li and Peter Grünberg and Qiang Li and Sheng-tao Ye and Yu-feng Tian and Shi-shen Yan and Zhao-jun Lin and Shi-shou Kang and Yan-xue Chen and Guo-lei Liu and Liang-mo Mei},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.06544},
year = {2019}
}