van der Waals (vdW) junctions by combining the anomalous Hall effect and the spin-dependent scattering effect, which contribute to the asymmetric and symmetric MR components, respectively. By setting the two ferromagnetic electrodes to the antiparallel configuration, a loop current is formed in the adjacent areas of different domains because of the opposite charge distributions dominated by the anomalous Hall effect. Thus, an extra potential drop is introduced to the read voltage, which results in the multistate MR. Furthermore, the ratio between these two components can be adjusted by modulating the interfacial barrier height, which varies the resistance states. These findings establish a scalable strategy for high-density memory and a viable route to advance performance modulation of spintronic hardware via vdW engineering.
Gao et al. (Thu,) studied this question.