Abstract
Active control of heat flow is crucial for the thermal management of increasingly complex electronic and spintronic devices. In addition to conventional heat transport engineering, spin caloritronics has received extensive attention as a heat control principle owing to its high controllability and unique thermal energy conversion symmetry. Here we demonstrate that the direction of heat currents generated by spin-caloritronic phenomena can be changed simply by illuminating magnetic materials with visible light. The optical control of heat currents is realized through a combination of the spin-driven thermoelectric conversion called an anomalous Ettingshausen effect and all-optical helicity-dependent switching of magnetization. This approach enables not only pinpoint manipulation and flexible design of the heat current distribution by patterning the illuminating light but also on/off control of the resulting temperature modulation by tuning the light polarization. These versatile heat control functionalities will open up a pathway for nanoscale thermal energy engineering.
Highlights
Active control of heat flow is crucial for the thermal management of increasingly complex electronic and spintronic devices
To demonstrate the magnetooptical control of the anomalous Ettingshausen effect (AEE)-induced heat current, we used alternately stacked [Co/Pt]n multilayer films, which are known to exhibit the all-optical helicity-dependent switching (AO-HDS) of magnetization[16,20]
While the dark contrast is barely changed after sweeping with σ+ light, the conversion from the dark to bright was observed after sweeping with σ− light, indicating that the [Co/Pt]4 sample exhibits the clear AO-HDS of magnetization
Summary
Active control of heat flow is crucial for the thermal management of increasingly complex electronic and spintronic devices. The optical control of heat currents is realized through a combination of the spin-driven thermoelectric conversion called an anomalous Ettingshausen effect and all-optical helicity-dependent switching of magnetization. This approach enables pinpoint manipulation and flexible design of the heat current distribution by patterning the illuminating light and on/off control of the resulting temperature modulation by tuning the light polarization. The local manipulation and flexible design of the heat-current distribution are exclusive features of spin-driven thermoelectric phenomena combined with the AO-HDS, providing active thermal management principles for electronic and spintronic devices. The concept of the magneto-optical painting of heat currents can be extended to various spin-caloritronic phenomena, such as the spin Peltier effect[3,5] and the anisotropic magneto-Peltier effect[4,7,9], while we focus on the AEE for the proof-of-concept in this work
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