Extraordinary magnetoresistance in high-quality graphene devices with daisy chains and Fermi-level pinning

Abstract

We studied daisy-chained extraordinary magnetoresistance (EMR) devices based on high quality monolayer graphene encapsulated in hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) at room temperature. The largest magnetoresistance (MR) achieved in our devices is 4.6 x 10^7 %, the record for EMR devices to date. The magnetic field sensitivity, dR/dB, reaches 104 kohm/T, exceeding the previous record set by encapsulated graphene by more than 300 %, and is comparable with state-of-the-art graphene Hall sensors at cryogenic temperatures (4.2 K). We demonstrate that daisy chaining multiple EMR devices is a new way to reach arbitrarily high sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio, and extremely small noise equivalent field for weak magnetic field detection. Finally, we show the evidence of metal contact-induced Fermi-level pinning in the sample and its influence on graphene properties, current distribution and EMR performance. We highlight the EMR geometry as an interesting alternative to the Hall geometry for fundamental physics studies.