Vertical transport and tunnelling in rare-earth nitride heterostructures.

We report an investigation of the ferromagnetic semiconductor rare earth nitrides (RENs) for their potential for cryogenic-temperature electronics and spintronics applications. We have identified ohmic contacts suitable for the device structures that demand electron transport through interface layers, and grown REN/insulator/REN heterostructures that display tunnelling characteristics, an enormous 400% tunneling magnetoresistance and a hysteresis promising their exploitation in non-volatile magnetic random access memory.