The long-standing popularity of thermoelectric materials has contributed to the creation of various thermoelectric devices and stimulated the development of strategies to improve their thermoelectric performance. In this review, we aim to comprehensively summarize the state-of-the-art strategies for the realization of high-performance thermoelectric materials and devices by establishing the links between synthesis, structural characteristics, properties, underlying chemistry and physics, including structural design (point defects, dislocations, interfaces, inclusions, and pores), multidimensional design (quantum dots/wires, nanoparticles, nanowires, nano- or microbelts, few-layered nanosheets, nano- or microplates, thin films, single crystals, and polycrystalline bulks), and advanced device design (thermoelectric modules, miniature generators and coolers, and flexible thermoelectric generators). The outline of each strategy starts with a concise presentation of their fundamentals and carefully selected examples. In the end, we point out the controversies, challenges, and outlooks toward the future development of thermoelectric materials and devices. Overall, this review will serve to help materials scientists, chemists, and physicists, particularly students and young researchers, in selecting suitable strategies for the improvement of thermoelectrics and potentially other relevant energy conversion technologies.

Advanced Thermoelectric Design: From Materials and Structures to Devices

Spin Hall effects convert charge currents into spin currents and vice versa even in nonmagnetic conductors due to spin orbit coupling. This enables spin Hall effects to be utilized both for the generation and detection of spin currents and magnetization dynamics. This paper reviews the experimental characterization of these effects in metallic systems, which have so far shown the highest efficiency in using spin Hall effects for charge-to-spin interconversion. The advantages and disadvantages of complimentary measurement techniques are discussed and in addition an outlook of the possible impact on applications is presented.

Spin Hall Effects in Metals

This article reviews static and dynamic interfacial effects in magnetism, focusing on interfacially-driven magnetic effects and phenomena associated with spin-orbit coupling and intrinsic symmetry breaking at interfaces. It provides a historical background and literature survey, but focuses on recent progress, identifying the most exciting new scientific results and pointing to promising future research directions. It starts with an introduction and overview of how basic magnetic properties are affected by interfaces, then turns to a discussion of charge and spin transport through and near interfaces and how these can be used to control the properties of the magnetic layer. Important concepts include spin accumulation, spin currents, spin transfer torque, and spin pumping. An overview is provided to the current state of knowledge and existing review literature on interfacial effects such as exchange bias, exchange spring magnets, spin Hall effect, oxide heterostructures, and topological insulators. The article highlights recent discoveries of interface-induced magnetism and non-collinear spin textures, non-linear dynamics including spin torque transfer and magnetization reversal induced by interfaces, and interfacial effects in ultrafast magnetization processes.

https://link.aps.org/accepted/10.1103/RevModPhys.89.025006

Interface-induced phenomena in magnetism

Manipulating a stubborn magnet Spintronics is an alternative to conventional electronics, based on using the electron's spin rather than its charge. Spintronic devices, such as magnetic memory, have traditionally used ferromagnetic materials to encode the 1's and 0's of the binary code. A weakness of this approach—that strong magnetic fields can erase the encoded information—could be avoided by using antiferromagnets instead of ferromagnets. But manipulating the magnetic ordering of antiferromagnets is tricky. Now, Wadley et al. have found a way (see the Perspective by Marrows). Running currents along specific directions in the thin films of the antiferromagnetic compound CuMnAs reoriented the magnetic domains in the material. Science, this issue p. 587; see also p. 558 Transport and optical measurements are used to demonstrate the switching of domains in the antiferromagnetic compound CuMnAs. [Also see Perspective by Marrows] Antiferromagnets are hard to control by external magnetic fields because of the alternating directions of magnetic moments on individual atoms and the resulting zero net magnetization. However, relativistic quantum mechanics allows for generating current-induced internal fields whose sign alternates with the periodicity of the antiferromagnetic lattice. Using these fields, which couple strongly to the antiferromagnetic order, we demonstrate room-temperature electrical switching between stable configurations in antiferromagnetic CuMnAs thin-film devices by applied current with magnitudes of order 106 ampere per square centimeter. Electrical writing is combined in our solid-state memory with electrical readout and the stored magnetic state is insensitive to and produces no external magnetic field perturbations, which illustrates the unique merits of antiferromagnets for spintronics.

/pdf/electrical-switching-of-an-antiferromagnet-2bcb2cox7l.pdf

Electrical switching of an antiferromagnet

Although electron motion is prohibited in magnetic insulators, the electron spin can be transported by magnons. Such magnons, generated and detected using all-electrical methods, are now shown to travel micrometre distances at room temperature. The transport of spin information has been studied in various materials, such as metals1, semiconductors2 and graphene3. In these materials, spin is transported by the diffusion of conduction electrons4. Here we study the diffusion and relaxation of spin in a magnetic insulator, where the large bandgap prohibits the motion of electrons. Spin can still be transported, however, through the diffusion of non-equilibrium magnons, the quanta of spin-wave excitations in magnetically ordered materials. Here we show experimentally that these magnons can be excited and detected fully electrically5,6,7 in a linear response, and can transport spin angular momentum through the magnetic insulator yttrium iron garnet (YIG) over distances as large as 40 μm. We identify two transport regimes: the diffusion-limited regime for distances shorter than the magnon spin diffusion length, and the relaxation-limited regime for larger distances. With a model similar to the diffusion–relaxation model for electron spin transport in (semi)conducting materials, we extract the magnon spin diffusion length λ = 9.4 ± 0.6 μm in a thin 200 nm YIG film at room temperature.

/pdf/long-distance-transport-of-magnon-spin-information-in-a-226ebl7ijd.pdf

Long-distance transport of magnon spin information in a magnetic insulator at room temperature

This Letter provides evidence for intrinsic longitudinal spin Seebeck effects (LSSEs) that are free from the anomalous Nernst effect (ANE) caused by an extrinsic proximity effect. We report the observation of LSSEs in Au/Y(3)Fe(5)O(12) (YIG) and Pt/Cu/YIG systems, showing that the LSSE appears even when the mechanism of the proximity ANE is clearly removed. In the conventional Pt/YIG structure, furthermore, we separate the LSSE from the ANE by comparing the voltages in different magnetization and temperature-gradient configurations; the ANE contamination was found to be negligibly small even in the Pt/YIG structure.

/pdf/longitudinal-spin-seebeck-effect-free-from-the-proximity-5d3ipv58bc.pdf

Longitudinal Spin Seebeck Effect Free from the Proximity Nernst Effect

The spin Seebeck effect refers to the generation of spin voltage as a result of a temperature gradient in ferromagnetic or ferrimagnetic materials. When a conductor is attached to a magnet under a temperature gradient, the thermally generated spin voltage in the magnet injects a spin current into the conductor, which in turn produces electric voltage owing to the spin-orbit interaction. The spin Seebeck effect is of increasing importance in spintronics, since it enables direct generation of a spin current from heat and appears in a variety of magnets ranging from metals and semiconductors to insulators. Recent studies on the spin Seebeck effect have been conducted mainly in paramagnetic metal/ferrimagnetic insulator junction systems in the longitudinal configuration in which a spin current flowing parallel to the temperature gradient is measured. This 'longitudinal spin Seebeck effect' (LSSE) has been observed in various sample systems and exclusively established by separating the spin-current contribution from extrinsic artefacts, such as conventional thermoelectric and magnetic proximity effects. The LSSE in insulators also provides a novel and versatile pathway to thermoelectric generation in combination of the inverse spin-Hall effects. In this paper, we review basic experiments on the LSSE and discuss its potential thermoelectric applications with several demonstrations.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0953-8984/26/34/343202/pdf

Longitudinal spin Seebeck effect: from fundamentals to applications

The spin Seebeck effect (SSE) refers to the generation of a spin current as a result of a temperature gradient in magnetic materials including insulators. The SSE is applicable to thermoelectric generation because the thermally generated spin current can be converted into a charge current via spin-orbit interaction in conductive materials adjacent to the magnets. The insulator-based SSE device exhibits unconventional characteristics potentially useful for thermoelectric applications, such as simple structure, device-design flexibility, and convenient scaling capability. In this article, we review recent studies on the SSE from the viewpoint of thermoelectric applications. Firstly, we introduce the thermoelectric generation process and measurement configuration of the SSE, followed by showing fundamental characteristics of the SSE device. Secondly, a theory of the thermoelectric conversion efficiency of the SSE device is presented, which clarifies the difference between the SSE and conventional thermoelectric effects and the efficiency limit of the SSE device. Finally, we show preliminary demonstrations of the SSE in various device structures for future thermoelectric applications and discuss prospects of the SSE-based thermoelectric technologies.

Thermoelectric generation based on spin Seebeck effects

The longitudinal spin Seebeck effect (LSSE) in $\mathrm{Pt}/{\mathrm{Y}}_{3}{\mathrm{Fe}}_{5}{\mathrm{O}}_{12}\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}(\mathrm{YIG})$ junction systems has been investigated at various magnetic fields and temperatures. We found that the LSSE voltage in a Pt/YIG-slab system is suppressed by applying high magnetic fields and this suppression is critically enhanced at low temperatures. The field-induced suppression of the LSSE in the Pt/YIG-slab system is too large at around room temperature to be explained simply by considering the effect of the Zeeman gap in magnon excitation. This result requires us to introduce a magnon-frequency-dependent mechanism into the scenario of LSSE; low-frequency magnons dominantly contribute to the LSSE. The magnetic field dependence of the LSSE voltage was observed to change by changing the thickness of YIG, suggesting that the thermospin conversion by the low-frequency magnons is suppressed in thin YIG films due to the long characteristic lengths of such magnons.

Critical suppression of spin Seebeck effect by magnetic fields

The spin Seebeck effect (SSE) refers to the generation of a spin current as a result of a temperature gradient in magnetic materials including insulators The SSE is applicable to thermoelectric generation because the thermally generated spin current can be converted into a charge current via spin-orbit interaction in conductive materials adjacent to the magnets The insulator-based SSE device exhibits unconventional characteristics potentially useful for thermoelectric applications, such as simple structure, device-design flexibility, and convenient scaling capability In this article, we review recent studies on the SSE from the viewpoint of thermoelectric applications Firstly, we introduce the thermoelectric generation process and measurement configuration of the SSE, followed by showing fundamental characteristics of the SSE device Secondly, a theory of the thermoelectric conversion efficiency of the SSE device is presented, which clarifies the difference between the SSE and conventional thermoelectric effects and the efficiency limit of the SSE device Finally, we show preliminary demonstrations of the SSE in various device structures for future thermoelectric applications and discuss prospects of the SSE-based thermoelectric technologies

Takashi Kikkawa

Papers

Longitudinal Spin Seebeck Effect Free from the Proximity Nernst Effect

Longitudinal spin Seebeck effect: from fundamentals to applications

Thermoelectric generation based on spin Seebeck effects

Critical suppression of spin Seebeck effect by magnetic fields

Thermoelectric Generation Based on Spin Seebeck Effects