English

Unidirectional Seebeck effect in magnetic topological insulators

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2019-11-20 v1

Abstract

We theoretically investigate the temperature gradient-dependent or unidirectional Seebeck effect (USE) in a magnetic/ nonmagnetic topological insulator (TI) heterostructure with in-plane magnetization in terms of the semiclassical electron dynamics and Fermi golden rule. The USE has a quantum origin arising from the magnon asymmetric scattering of surface Dirac electrons on TI. We discuss the USE in the heterostructures, Crx_{x}(Bi1y_{1-y}Sby_y)2x_{2-x}Te3_{3}/ (Bi1y_{1-y}Sby)2_{y})_2Te3_{3}. The USE exhibits cosϕ\cos\phi-dependence (measured from yy-direction) on the orientation of magnetization. It's found that the sign of USE stays unchanged when the system is transferred from pp-doping to nn-doping. The USE shows on inverse-linearly temperature dependent at high temperature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.08122,
  title  = {Unidirectional Seebeck effect in magnetic topological insulators},
  author = {Xiao-Qin Yu and Zhen-Gang Zhu and Gang Su},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.08122},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

11 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:20:19.631Z