We show that the temperature measurement sensitivity in the lock-in thermoreflectance (LITR) can be improved by incorporating a thermochromic liquid crystal (TLC) into a transducer. The quantitatively estimated thermoreflectance coefficient of a TLC/Pt hybrid film depends on the excitation frequency and reaches >2 × 10−2 K−1 at low excitation frequencies, which is two orders of magnitude greater than typical values of 10−4 for metallic films. Using the TLC/Pt film, we detected the temperature changes due to Joule heating and the spin Peltier effect with the temperature resolution of ∼10 μK by the LITR method. We also performed the same measurements for an Au film and found that the temperature resolution for the TLC/Pt film is increased by a factor of >10 compared with that for the Au film despite the low reflected light intensity of the TLC/Pt film.
The temperature and yttrium-iron-garnet (YIG) thickness dependences of the spin Peltier effect (SPE) have been investigated using a Pt/YIG junction system at temperatures ranging from room temperature to the Curie temperature of YIG by the lock-in thermography method. By analyzing the YIG thickness dependence using an exponential decay model, the characteristic length of SPE in YIG is estimated to be 0.9 μm near room temperature and almost constant even near the Curie temperature. The high-temperature behavior of SPE is clearly different from that of the spin Seebeck effect, providing a clue for microscopically understanding the reciprocal relation between them.
We have characterized Co2MnGa (CMG) Heusler alloy films grown on Y3Fe5O12 (YIG) and Gd3Ga5O12 (GGG) substrates at different deposition temperatures and investigated thermo-spin and magneto-thermoelectric conversion properties by means of a lock-in thermography technique. X-ray diffraction, magnetization, and electrical transport measurements show that the deposition at high substrate temperatures induces the crystallized structures of CMG, while the resistivity of the CMG films on YIG (GGG) prepared at and above 500 °C (550 °C) becomes too high to measure the thermo-spin and magneto-thermoelectric effects due to large roughness, highlighting the difficulty of fabricating highly ordered continuous CMG films on garnet structures. Our lock-in thermography measurements show that the deposition at high substrate temperatures results in an increase in the current-induced temperature change for CMG/GGG and a decrease in that for CMG/YIG. The former indicates the enhancement of the anomalous Ettingshausen effect in CMG through crystallization. The latter can be explained by the superposition of the anomalous Ettingshausen effect and the spin Peltier effect induced by the positive (negative) charge-to-spin conversion for the amorphous (crystallized) CMG films. These results provide a hint to construct spin-caloritronic devices based on Heusler alloys.
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