Room-Temperature Gate-Tunable Nonreciprocal Charge Transport in Lattice-Matched InSb/CdTe Heterostructures

Symmetry manipulation can be used to effectively tailor the physical order in solid-state systems. With the breaking of both the inversion and time-reversal symmetries, nonreciprocal magneto-transport may arise in nonmagnetic systems to enrich spin-orbit effects. Here, the observation of unidirectional magnetoresistance (UMR) in lattice-matched InSb/CdTe films is investigated up to room temperature. Benefiting from the strong built-in electric field of 0.13 V nm^-1 in the heterojunction region, the resulting Rashba-type spin-orbit coupling and quantum confinement result in a distinct sinusoidal UMR signal with a nonreciprocal coefficient that is 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than most non-centrosymmetric materials at 298 K. Moreover, this heterostructure configuration enables highly efficient gate tuning of the rectification response, wherein the UMR amplitude is enhanced by 40%. The results of this study advocate the use of narrow-bandgap semiconductor-based hybrid systems with robust spin textures as suitable platforms for the pursuit of controllable chiral spin-orbit applications.