Fig. 2: Examining the magnetic anisotropy of CrSBr through electron tunnelling.

a, Schematic of a CrSBr-based MTJ showing a CrSBr bilayer sandwiched between thin graphite contacts. Blue, yellow and red balls correspond to Cr, S and Br, respectively. Green arrows depict spins that lie in-plane. a, b and c crystal axes of the CrSBr bilayer are indicated. b, Optical image of a device. The red dashed line outlines the CrSBr bilayer and the yellow and white dashed lines outline the top and bottom hBN layers, respectively. The graphite electrodes can be seen as the two grey regions in the figure. These overlap each other only within the area of the CrSBr flake. The Au wires that are connected to the graphite regions are only 1 μm wide and can be seen as thin reddish lines. Scale bar, 10 μm. c, Conductance versus temperature at ZF. The knee at 133 K indicates the Néel temperature. Drawings of the spin order in each state are given in the insets. d, Tunnelling current versus field at 2 K with field oriented along different directions as indicated in the inset, in which a and b are the crystal axes. A constant DC bias of 10 mV is applied. e, Field-orientation dependence of the tunnelling current in the a–b plane at 2 K. A constant DC bias of 10 mV is applied. The blue arrow along the y axis indicates the sweeping direction of the field. The angles corresponding to the crystal axes are marked by inverted triangles.