Optimal half-metal band structure for large thermoelectric performance

Abstract

Half-metal ferromagnets were predicted [in IEEE Trans. Mag. 51, 1 (2015)] to give large thermoelectric performance in anti-parallel spin valve configuration. Despite being metals that suffer from the Wiedemann-Franz law, the additional spin degrees of freedom allow for tuning of the thermoelectric properties due to the spin-valve enhancement factor (SVEF). We test this theory and find a mismatch of parameters that gives large TE performance and large SVEF. As a result, we show that the spin-valve setup is useful only for gapless HMF with initially poor TE performance. To obtain the largest TE performance, one still needs to open the band gap.

arXiv comment9 pages

References in corpus (3)

• Thermoelectric Effects in Magnetic Nanostructures
• Quantum effects in the thermoelectric power factor of low-dimensional semiconductors
• Spin Seebeck Power Conversion