Our lab won a Crédits de Recherche (CDR) grant from the FNRS. This will enable us to investigate spin caloritronic effects in 2D systems!
Spin-caloritronics, the field studying the interplay between spin and heat transport, is gaining increasing attention since it could help overcome the shortcomings of conventional thermoelectrics or enable novel strategies for spin-current creation or the manipulation of local magnetization for spintronics. Although first spin-caloritronic energy harvesters show promising results, heat-to-charge conversion is still very inefficient. Efforts to increase this performance are mainly hampered by the lack of fundamental understanding of microscopic processes and material parameters responsible for heat-to-spin and spin-to-charge conversion. We will now experimentally investigate the thermal and electrical details of nanoscale spin caloritronics. This project will lead to a deeper understanding of nanoscale spin-to-heat conversion and pave the way for future energy harvesting and spot-cooling devices, thermally driven spin sources or thermal spin-transfer torques based on low-dimensional materials.