Gate tunable giant anisotropic resistance in ultra-thin GaTe

Anisotropy in crystals arises from different lattice periodicity along different crystallographic directions, and is usually more pronounced in two dimensional (2D) materials. Indeed, in the emerging 2D materials, electrical anisotropy has been one of the recent research focuses. However, key understandings of the in-plane anisotropic resistance in low-symmetry 2D materials, as well as demonstrations of model devices taking advantage of it, have proven difficult. Here, we show that, in few-layered semiconducting GaTe, electrical conductivity anisotropy between x and y directions of the 2D crystal can be gate tuned from several fold to over 103. This effect is further demonstrated to yield an anisotropic non-volatile memory behavior in ultra-thin GaTe, when equipped with an architecture of van der Waals floating gate. Our findings of gate-tunable giant anisotropic resistance effect pave the way for potential applications in nanoelectronics such as multifunctional directional memories in the 2D limit.