Quantum Phase Transition in the Spin Transport Properties of Ferromagnetic Metal-Insulator-Metal Hybrid Materials

Perpendicular magnetic tunnel junctions provide a technologically important design platform for studying metal-insulator-metal heterostructure materials. Accurate characterization of the sensitivity of their electronic structure to proximity coupling effects based on first-principles calculations is key in the fundamental understanding of their emergent collective properties at macroscopic scales. Here, we use an effective field theory that combines ab initio calculations of the electronic structure within density functional theory with the plane waves calculation of the spin polarised conductance to gain insights into the proximity effect induced magnetoelectric couplings that arise in the transport of spin angular momentum when a monolayer tunnel barrier material is integrated into the magnetic tunnel junction. We find that the spin density of states exhibits a discontinuous change from half-metallic to the metallic character in the presence of monolayer hexagonal boron nitride when the applied electric field reaches a critical amplitude, and this signals a first order transition in the transport phase. This unravels an electric-field induced quantum phase transition in the presence of a monolayer hexagonal boron nitride tunnel barrier quite unlike molybdenum disulphide. The role of the applied electric field in the observed phase transition is understood in terms of the induced spin-flip transition and the charge transfer at the constituent interfaces. The results of this study show that the choice of the tunnel barrier layer material plays a nontrivial role in determining the magnetoelectric couplings during spin tunnelling under external field bias.