We propose encapsulating type-A antiferromagnetic semiconductors between graphene layers to realize a gate-tunable synthetic antiferromagnet with nonrelativistic spin splitting, enabling efficient spintronic transport via graphene. Density functional theory calculations and tight-binding models of a graphene/MnS/graphene heterostructure reveal that gate tuning of the heterostructure breaks the top/bottom graphene equivalence, inducing opposite ferromagnetic proximity exchange that lifts spin degeneracy to yield nonrelativistic spin splitting at the Fermi level, dominating over relativistic effects. The induced effects manifest as conductance dips in spin-resolved transport through proximitized graphene nanoribbons, observable as giant magnetoresistance within a narrow energy window around the Fermi level. Our graphene/type-A antiferromagnetic heterostructure, a readily synthesizable platform incorporating antiferromagnets with nonrelativistic spin splitting, paves the way for gate-manipulated, low-dimensional antiferromagnetic devices.

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• Antiferromagnetism
• Graphene
• Heterostructures
• Synthetic antiferromagnetic multilayers
• Density functional calculations
• Green's function methods
• Methods in transport
• Tight-binding model