We report a complete characterization of the anomalous Nernst effect (ANE) and its relationship with the anomalous Hall effect (AHE) in Fe 3 O 4 . By combining full thermoelectric and electric transport measurements as a function of temperature, we have verified that the universal scaling relation between the anomalous Hall and diagonal conductivities (σ zy ∝ σ 1.6 zz ), observed in materials with bad-metal-hopping type of conduction, is also applicable to the thermoelectric transport. We further show that the ANE and AHE are commonly related through the Mott relation, therefore demonstrating its validity for anomalous transport phenomena in materials with conduction in the the dirty regime.

We unravel the origin of current-induced magnetic switching of insulating antiferromagnet/heavy metal systems. We utilize concurrent transport and magneto-optical measurements to image the switching of antiferromagnetic domains in specially engineered devices of NiO/Pt bilayers. Different electrical pulsing and device geometries reveal different final states of the switching with respect to the current direction. We can explain these through simulations of the temperature-induced strain, and we identify the thermomagnetoelastic switching mechanism combined with thermal excitations as the origin, in which the final state is defined by the strain distributions and heat is required to switch the antiferromagnetic domains. We show that such a potentially very versatile noncontact mechanism can explain the previously reported contradicting observations of the switching final state, which were attributed to spin−orbit torque mechanisms.

We report a systematic study on the thermoelectric performance of spin Seebeck devices based on Fe 3 O 4 /Pt junction systems. We explore two types of device geometries: a spin Hall thermopile and spin Seebeck multilayer structures. The spin Hall thermopile increases the sensitivity of the spin Seebeck effect, while the increase in the sample internal resistance has a detrimental effect on the output power. We found that the spin Seebeck multilayers can overcome this limitation since the multilayers exhibit the enhancement of the thermoelectric voltage and the reduction of the internal resistance simultaneously, therefore resulting in significant power enhancement. This result demonstrates that the multilayer structures are useful for improving the thermoelectric performance of the spin Seebeck effect.