No Arabic abstract
Spin injection in metallic normal/ferromagnetic junctions is investigated taking into account the anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR) occurring in the ferromagnetic layer. It is shown, on the basis of a generalized two channel model, that there is an interface resistance contribution due to anisotropic scattering, beyond spin accumulation and giant magnetoresistance (GMR). The corresponding expression of the thermopower is derived and compared with the expression for the thermopower produced by the GMR. First measurements of anisotropic magnetothermopower are presented in electrodeposited Ni nanowires contacted with Ni, Au and Cu. The results of this study show that while the giant magnetoresistance and corresponding thermopower demonstrates the role of spin-flip scattering, the observed anisotropic magnetothermopower indicates interband s-d relaxation mechanisms.
Black phosphorus (BP) has emerged as a direct-bandgap semiconducting material with great application potentials in electronics, photonics, and energy conversion. Experimental characterization of the anisotropic thermal properties of BP, however, is extremely challenging due to the lack of reliable and accurate measurement techniques to characterize anisotropic samples that are micrometers in size. Here, we report measurement results of the anisotropic thermal conductivity of bulk BP along three primary crystalline orientations, using the novel time-resolved magneto-optical Kerr effect (TR-MOKE) with enhanced measurement sensitivities. Two-dimensional beam-offset TR-MOKE signals from BP flakes yield the thermal conductivity along the zigzag crystalline direction to be 84 ~ 101 W/(m*K), nearly three times as large as that along the armchair direction (26 ~ 36 W/(m*K)). The through-plane thermal conductivity of BP ranges from 4.3 to 5.5 W/(m*K). The first-principles calculation was performed for the first time to predict the phonon transport in BP both along the in-plane zigzag and armchair directions and along the through-plane direction. This work successfully unveiled the fundamental mechanisms of anisotropic thermal transport along the three crystalline directions in bulk BP, as demonstrated by the excellent agreement between our first-principles-based theoretical predictions and experimental characterizations on the anisotropic thermal conductivities of bulk BP.
We have studied spin dephasing in a high-mobility two-dimensional electron system (2DES), confined in a GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well grown in the [110] direction, using the resonant spin amplification (RSA) technique. From the characteristic shape of the RSA spectra, we are able to extract the spin dephasing times (SDT) for electron spins aligned along the growth direction or within the sample plane, as well as the $g$ factor. We observe a strong anisotropy in the spin dephasing times. While the in-plane SDT remains almost constant as the temperature is varied between 4 K and 50 K, the out-of-plane SDT shows a dramatic increase at a temperature of about 25 K and reaches values of about 100 ns. The SDTs at 4 K can be further increased by additional, weak above-barrier illumination. The origin of this unexpected behavior is discussed, the SDT enhancement is attributed to the redistribution of charge carriers between the electron gas and remote donors.
The Weyl semimetal NbP exhibits an extremely large magnetoresistance (MR) and an ultra-high mobility. The large MR originates from a combination of the nearly perfect compensation between electron- and hole-type charge carriers and the high mobility, which is relevant to the topological band structure. In this work we report on temperature- and field-dependent thermopower and thermal conductivity experiments on NbP. Additionally, we carried out complementary heat capacity, magnetization, and electrical resistivity measurements. We found a giant adiabatic magnetothermopower with a maximum of 800 $mu$V/K at 50 K in a field of 9 T. Such large effects have been observed rarely in bulk materials. We suggest that the origin of this effect might be related to the high charge-carrier mobility. We further observe pronounced quantum oscillations in both thermal conductivity and thermopower. The obtained frequencies compare well with our heat capacity and magnetization data.
The absorption of heavily doped graphene in the terahertz (THz) and mid-infrared (MIR) spectral regions is considered taking into account both the elastic scattering due to finite-range disorder and the variations of concentration due to long-range disorder. Interplay between intra- and interband transitions is analyzed for the high-frequency regime of response, near the Pauli blocking threshold. The gate voltage and temperature dependencies of the absorption efficiency are calculated. It is demonstrated that for typical parameters, the smearing of the interband absorption edge is determined by a unscreened part of long-range disorder while the intraband absorption is determined by finite-range scattering. The latter yields the spectral dependencies which deviate from those following from the Drude formula. The obtained dependencies are in good agreement with recent experimental results. The comparison of the results of our calculations with the experimental data provides a possibility to extract the disorder characteristics.
In many realistic topological materials, more than one kind of fermions contribute to the electronic bands crossing the Fermi level, leading to various novel phenomena. Here, using momentum-resolved inelastic electron scattering, we investigate the plasmons and their evolution across the phase transition in a type-II Weyl Semimetal MoTe$_2$, in which both Weyl fermions and trivial nonrelativistic fermions contribute to the Fermi surface in the Td phase. One plasmon mode in the 1T phase at high temperature and two plasmon modes in the topological T$_d$ phase at low temperature are observed. Combining with first-priciples calculations, we show that all the plasmon modes are dominated by the interband correlations between the inverted bands of MoTe$_2$. Especially in the T$_d$ phase, since the electronic bands split due to inversion symmetry breaking and spin-orbit coupling, the plasmon modes manifest the interband correlation between the topological Weyl fermions and the trivial nonrelativistic electrons. Our work emphasizes the significance of the interplay between different kinds of carriers in plasmons of topological materials.