Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

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MA: Fachverband Magnetismus

MA 35: Spin dependent Transport Phenomena

MA 35.8: Talk

Wednesday, March 9, 2016, 17:00–17:15, H33

Giant spin Nernst effect induced by resonant scattering at surfaces of metallic films — •N. H. Long, P. Mavropoulos, B. Zimmermann, S. Blügel, and Y. Mokrousov — Peter Grünberg Institut and Institute for Advanced Simulation, Forschungszentrum Jülich and JARA, 52425 Jülich, Germany

The spin Nernst effect (SNE), where a transverse spin current is generated in a metal by an applied temperature gradient, is expected to open new possibilities in the field of spin caloric transport. However, due to limitations on the magnitude of temperature gradients in metals, the magnitude of SNE observed in experiments is rather small.

In this work, a new concept for engineering a giant SNE in metallic films is proposed by means of resonant impurity scattering. Extending the Fert and Levy model [1] for the spin Hall effect to the case of SNE, we found that scattering off sharp resonant impurity states leads to a strong asymmetric energy-dependence of charge and spin conductivities, as well as of the spin Hall angle. As a result, the spin Nernst conductivity (SNC) is predicted to be gigantic in a wide range of temperatures. By employing the first-principles relativistic full-potential Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker Green function method, we demonstrate that the SNC in Ag(111) films with 1% covarage of Pb or Cr adatom impurities can reach up to 200 (A/K m) at 300 K, exceeding up to one order of magnitude the values of the SNE reported so far.

We acknowledge funding from SPP 1538 SpinCaT programme and HGF-YIG Programme VH-NG-513.

[1] A. Fert and P. M. Levy, Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 157208 (2011).