Abstract
Material systems that exhibit tunable spin-selective conductivity are key components of spintronic technologies. Here, we demonstrate a mechanism for spin-selective transport that is based on the unusual Landau-level sequence observed in bilayer WSe2 under large applied magnetic fields. We find that the conductivity depends strongly on the relative ordering between conducting electrons with different spins and valleys in a partially filled Landau level and the localized electrons of lower-energy filled Landau levels. We observe that the conductivity is almost completely suppressed when the spin ratio and field-tuned Coulomb energy exceed a critical threshold. We achieve switching between on and off states through either modulation of the external magnetic or electric fields, with many-body interactions driving a collective switching mechanism. In contrast to magnetoresistive heterostructures, this mechanism achieves electrically tunable spin filtering within a single material, driven by the interaction between free and localized spins residing in energy-separated spin-and-valley-polarized bands. Similar spin-selective conductivity may be realizable in flat-band systems at zero magnetic field.
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Data availability
The data supporting the findings in this study are available via Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28435061 (ref. 32). Other data are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank L. Balicas, W. Coniglio and B. Pullum for help with the experiments at the National High Magnetic Field Lab and also thank L. Balicas for helpful discussions. This research is primarily supported by the US Department of Energy (Grant No. DE-SC0016703). The synthesis of WSe2 (D.R. and K.B.) was supported by the Columbia University Materials Science and Engineering Research Center through the National Science Foundation (NSF; Grant Nos. DMR-1420634 and DMR-2011738). The work of K.Y. was supported by the NSF (Grant Nos. DMR-1932796 and DMR-2315954). A portion of this work was performed at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, which is supported by the NSF (Cooperative Agreement No. DMR-1644779) and the State of Florida. K.W. and T.T. acknowledge support from the JSPS (KAKENHI Grant Nos. 20H00354, 21H05233 and 23H02052) and the World Premier International Research Center Initiative, MEXT, Japan.
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E.-M.S. fabricated the samples. E.-M.S. and Q.S. performed the transport measurements and analysed the data. D.R., B.K. and J.H. grew the WSe2 crystals. K.W. and T.T. grew the hexagonal BN crystals. K.Y. supervised the theoretical aspects of this work. E.-M.S., Q.S., K.Y., J.H. and C.R.D. wrote the manuscript with input from all the authors.
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Shih, EM., Shi, Q., Rhodes, D. et al. Spin-selective magneto-conductivity in WSe2. Nat. Phys. 21, 1231–1236 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-025-02918-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-025-02918-5
