Gigantic tunneling magnetoresistance in magnetic Weyl semimetal tunnel junctions

Abstract

We investigate the tunneling magnetoresistance in magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) comprised of Weyl semimetal contacts. We show that chirality-magnetization locking leads to a gigantic tunneling magnetoresistance ratio, an effect that does not rely on spin filtering by the tunnel barrier. Our results indicate that the conductance in the antiparallel configuration is more sensitive to magnetization fluctations than in MTJs with normal ferromagnets, and predicts a TMR as large as ${10}^{4}$ % when realistic magnetization fluctuations are accounted for. In addition, we show that the Fermi arc states give rise to a non-monotonic dependence of conductance on the misalignment angle between the magnetizations of the two contacts.