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technical paper
Anomalous Nernst effect in epitaxially grown Fe4 xNixN films
The anomalous Nernst effect (ANE) generates an electric field (EANE) orthogonal to both magnetization and temperature gradient in ferromagnetic materials. In order to realize high-performance ANE-based thermoelectric power generation devices, exploring a material with a large anomalous Nernst coefficient (SANE) is essential. Fe4N is a promising material with relatively large SANE of 2.2 μV/K 1. In this study, Fe4-xNixN films were fabricated and their ANEs were characterized to reveal the Ni addition effect to Fe4N.
The Fe4-xNixN films were grown on MgAl2O4(MAO)(001) substrates at 450 °C. The structures of the samples were characterized by x-ray diffraction. The Ni/Fe ratio, x, in Fe4-xNixN films was changed in the range of 0 ≤ x ≤ 2.8. The samples were microfabricated into a Hall bar shape, and ANE, the Seebeck effect, and the anomalous Hall effect (AHE) were characterized 2. The external magnetic field dependence of EANE was measured at different temperature gradient and SANE was estimated. The transverse conductivity (σxy) and the transverse thermoelectric conductivity (αxy) of Fe3NiN was calculated by the first-principles calculation 3.
The Fe4-xNixN films were epitaxially grown on the MAO(001) substrates, but the Fe4-xNixN phase started to decompose into FeNi at about x = 2.3. The relationship between SANE, Seebeck coefficient (SSE) and x in Fe4-xNixN is shown in Fig. 1. The SANE value decreased from 1.7 to 0.6 μV/K and the SSE value increased from -2.3 to 1.2 μV/K with the increase of x. By using the experimental data, αxy was calculated. The result showed that αxy decreased with the increase of x and the change of αxy dominated the change of SANE. In the presentation, the obtained σxy and αxy values will be compared with the calculation results.
This work was supported by the Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) (Grant No. JP18H05246) and (C) (Grant No. JP21K04859) from JSPS KAKENHI, Collaborative Research Center on Energy Materials, Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University, and the Cooperative Research Project of the Research Institute of Electric Communication, Tohoku University.
References
1 S. Isogami, K. Takanashi, and M. Mizuguchi, Appl. Phys. Express 10, 073005 (2017).
2 J. Wang, Y.-C. Lau, W. Zhou, T. Seki, Y. Sakuraba, T. Kubota, K. Ito, and K. Takanashi, Adv. Electron. Mater. 8, 2101380 (2022).
3 Y. Tsubowa, M. Tsujikawa, and M. Shirai, the 69th JSAP spring meeting 2022, 23a-E205-5 (2022).