Berlin 2015 – scientific programme
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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen
TT 9: Transport: Spintronics and Magnetotransport (jointly with HL, MA)
TT 9.2: Talk
Monday, March 16, 2015, 09:45–10:00, A 053
Room-Temperature Spin Thermoelectrics in Metallic Films — •Sebastian Tölle1, Cosimo Gorini2, and Ulrich Eckern1 — 1Institute of Physics, University of Augsburg, 86135 Augsburg, Germany — 2Faculty of Physics, University of Regensburg, 93040 Regensburg, Germany
Efficient heat-to-spin conversion is the central goal of spin caloritronics. When considering metallic systems, two interesting phenomena stand out in this field: the spin Nernst effect and thermally-induced spin polarizations. They consist in the generation of, respectively, a spin current or a spin polarization transverse to an applied temperature gradient, i.e., they are the thermal counterparts of the well known spin Hall effect and current-induced spin polarization (Edelstein effect). We study these phenomena considering dynamical spin-orbit coupling, namely the spin-orbit coupling with phonons and vibrating impurities, which give rise to a dynamical side-jump mechanism and dynamical Elliott-Yafet spin relaxation. Such processes, which have not been considered before in this context, dominate at temperatures T>TD, with TD the Debye temperature. This condition is met in typical spin injection/extraction experiments performed at room temperature in transition metals such as Pt, Au, and Ta. Our results show a nonlinear T-dependence of the spin Nernst and spin Hall conductivities due to an interplay between intrinsic (Bychkov-Rashba type) and extrinsic (dynamical) spin-orbit coupling [1].
[1] S. Tölle, C. Gorini, and U. Eckern, arXiv:1409.1809 (2014)
(accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. B).