The research group led by Professor Masaaki Tanaka has fabricated a bilayer heterojunction consisting of a nonmagnetic semiconductor and a ferromagnetic semiconductor and successfully observed a giant spin splitting in the nonmagnetic semiconductor due to magnetic coupling at the interface. The maximum energy of the spin splitting reached 18 meV, which is more than four times larger than that reported in the previous research of the same group. This heterojunction was fabricated into a transistor structure, and it was demonstrated that the coupling strength between the electrons in the nonmagnetic semiconductor InAs and the magnetism of the ferromagnet GaFeSb can be increased or decreased by applying a gate voltage, thereby inducing and modulating spin splitting in the electronic state of the nonmagnetic InAs. The results are expected to be applied to next-generation spintronics and topological quantum devices. The resulting paper was published online in the British scientific journal “Communications Physics” on January 15(UK time).
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