Optimal half-metal band structure for large thermoelectric performance

Abstract

Half-metal ferromagnets were predicted [in IEEE Trans. Mag. 51, 1 (2015)] to give large thermoelectric performance in anti-parallel spin valve configuration. Despite being metals that suffer from the Wiedemann-Franz law, the additional spin degrees of freedom allow for tuning of the thermoelectric properties due to the spin-valve enhancement factor (SVEF). We test this theory and find a mismatch of parameters that gives large TE performance and large SVEF. As a result, we show that the spin-valve setup is useful only for gapless HMF with initially poor TE performance. To obtain the largest TE performance, one still needs to open the band gap.