Recently, the research group led by Prof. Ke Xia from the School of Physics at Southeast University has made significant progress in the study of spin transport in two-dimensional compensated semimetal/van der Waals magnetic heterostructures. The related work, entitled “Giant unusual anisotropic magnetoresistance enabled by hole-electron resonance in van der Waals heterostructures,” has been published in Nature Communications.
Spin transport lies at the core of spintronic devices. Conventional spintronics has largely been developed within a framework where transport is dominated by electronic carriers, while Coulomb interactions and charge accumulation often impose fundamental limitations on spin transmission efficiency. Overcoming these electron-dominated constraints to realize efficient and tunable spin transport remains a central challenge in the field.
As a prototypical hole-electron compensated semimetal, two-dimensional WTe₂ features coexisting electron and hole bands near the Fermi level with a highly symmetric distribution in momentum space, providing an ideal platform to explore spin transport mechanisms beyond conventional Coulomb constraints. Based on this, the research team fabricated WTe₂/Fe₃GaTe₂ van der Waals heterostructures and systematically investigated the impact of hole-electron resonance on unusual anisotropic magnetoresistance (UAMR) and transverse transport through angle-dependent and temperature-dependent magnetotransport measurements.
The study reveals that within the low-temperature regime where hole-electron resonance occurs, the UAMR in WTe₂/Fe₃GaTe₂ heterostructures is significantly enhanced, reaching up to 288.78%, far exceeding the simple superposition of contributions from individual WTe₂ and Fe₃GaTe₂ layers. Angular-dependent measurements show that the anomalous UAMR behavior is strongly correlated with the magnetization direction of the Fe₃GaTe₂ layer, indicating a strong interaction between the magnetic moments and the hole-electron compensated interface. Meanwhile, transverse transport exhibits chirality and symmetry breaking with respect to the ab plane, which is closely related to the highly anisotropic spin–orbit coupling in WTe₂ and the C₃v point group symmetry of the heterostructure. Temperature-dependent evolution further demonstrates that the enhanced UAMR coincides with the temperature range where electron and hole densities are nearly balanced; once the system deviates from the compensation condition, the UAMR rapidly decreases to levels typical of conventional magnetic heterostructures.
This work not only uncovers the mechanism of giant UAMR and chiral transverse transport arising from the coupling between the compensated state and the magnetic interface, but also provides important physical insights for the design of novel spintronic devices based on compensated semimetals.
The first author of this work is Dr. Qian Chen, a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Physics, Southeast University. Prof. Ke Xia (Southeast University), Prof. Yong Jiang, and Associate Prof. Zhiyan Jia (Tiangong University) are the corresponding authors. Southeast University is the primary affiliation. This research was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Jiangsu Provincial Excellent Postdoctoral Program, and the Tianjin Key R&D Program.
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-68438-9
