Metallic Contact Contributions in Thermal Hall Conductivity Measurements

Abstract

We investigate the influence of metallic contacts on thermal Hall measurements. By analyzing typical measurement setups, we show that heat currents bypassing through metallic contacts could generate non-negligible thermal Hall signals. We find that contributions from metallic contacts with thicknesses on the order of 10$^{-2}$ of sample widths can approximately replicate experimental observations across different materials in both temperature dependence and magnitude, assuming silver contacts with a conductivity of $10^{8}~\mathrm{S/m}$. Our analysis underscores the need to minimize metallic contact effects in thermal Hall measurements, which can be achieved by optimizing measurement configurations.