We investigate the influence of metallic contacts on thermal Hall measurements. By analyzing typical measurement setups, we show that heat currents bypassing through metallic contacts could generate non-negligible thermal Hall signals. We find that contributions from metallic contacts with thicknesses on the order of 10−2 of sample widths can approximately replicate experimental observations across different materials in both temperature dependence and magnitude, assuming silver contacts with a conductivity of 108S/m. Our analysis underscores the need to minimize metallic contact effects in thermal Hall measurements, which can be achieved by optimizing measurement configurations.
@article{arxiv.2508.11240,
title = {Metallic Contact Contributions in Thermal Hall Conductivity Measurements},
author = {Hongyu Ma and Xuesong Hu and Junren Shi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.11240},
year = {2025}
}