Gate-tunable giant nonreciprocal charge transport in noncentrosymmetric oxide interfaces

A polar conductor, where inversion symmetry is broken, may exhibit directional propagation of itinerant electrons, i.e., the rightward and leftward currents differ from each other, when time-reversal symmetry is also broken. This potential rectification effect was shown to be very weak due to the fact that the kinetic energy is much higher than the energies associated with symmetry breaking, producing weak perturbations. Here we demonstrate the appearance of giant nonreciprocal charge transport in the conductive oxide interface, LaAlO₃/SrTiO₃, where the electrons are confined to two-dimensions with low Fermi energy. In addition, the Rashba spin-orbit interaction correlated with the sub-band hierarchy of this system enables a strongly tunable nonreciprocal response by applying a gate voltage. The observed behavior of directional response in LaAlO₃/SrTiO₃ is associated with comparable energy scales among kinetic energy, spin-orbit interaction, and magnetic field, which inspires a promising route to enhance nonreciprocal response and its functionalities in spin orbitronics.