Thermoelectric Phenomena in a Magnetic Heterostructure with AAH Modulation: Charge and Spin Figure of Merits

Abstract

ABSTRACT We put forward a prescription of getting a higher value of the spin-dependent figure of merit in comparison with its charge counterpart in the case of a 1D magnetic heterostructure (a ferromagnetic (FM) chain sandwiched between two non-magnetic 1D lattices) where all the site energies of the heterostructure follow cosine form of modulation defined in Aubry-Andre-Harper (AAH) model. It is shown that due to having a greater number of non-uniform peaks in its transmission spectra, the thermoelectric efficiency of this heterostructure becomes superior compared to that is obtained in a fully ferromagnetic 1D chain. It is also reported that the maximum value of the thermoelectric figure of merit (for both spin and charge-dependent cases) of the heterostructure in a specified energy range gets enhanced in a continuous manner as the disorder strength of the AAH modulation is increased. The Hamiltonian of the proposed quantum system is described within a tight-binding (TB) framework and after the evaluation of transmission probability by utilizing the non-equilibrium Green’s function (NEGF) technique, all the important thermoelectric quantities are determined on the basis of Landauer formalism. We believe that our study on this particular topic of spin caloritronics, a subject associated with temperature-dependent spin transmission through a quantum channel, may help to explore several fascinating ideas about spin-related thermoelectric efficiency in many other ferromagnetic quasicrystals.