Influence of Mn concentration on magnetic topological insulator Mn<inf>x</inf>Bi<inf>2−x</inf>Te<inf>3</inf> thin film Hall effect sensor

Abstract

Hall-effect (HE) sensors based on high-quality Mn-doped Bi2Te3 topological insulator (TI) thin films have been systematically studied in this paper. Improvement of Hall sensitivity is found after doping the magnetic element Mn into Bi2Te3. The sensors with low Mn concentrations, MnxBi2-xTe3, x = 0.01 and 0.08 show the linear behavior of Hall resistance with sensitivity about 5 Ω/T. And their Hall sensitivity shows weak dependence on temperature. For sensors with high Mn concentration (x = 0.23), the Hall resistance with respect to magnetic field shows a hysteretic behavior. Moreover, its sensitivity shows almost eight times as high as that of the HE sensors with low Mn concentration. The highest sensitivity can reach 43 Ω/T at very low magnetic field. This increase of Hall sensitivity is caused by the occurrence of anomalous HE (AHE) after ferromagnetic phase transition. Our work indicates that the magnetic-element-doped TIs with AHE are good candidates for HE sensors.