# Fabrication of yttrium-iron-garnet/Pt multilayers for the longitudinal spin Seebeck effect

## TL;DR

This study presents a new fabrication method for YIG/Pt multilayers that enhances the longitudinal spin Seebeck effect, showing increased thermoelectric power with more layers, which could advance LSSE device development.

## Contribution

Developed a room-temperature sputtering and post-annealing method to fabricate YIG/Pt multilayers with improved LSSE properties and demonstrated power factor enhancement with increasing layer number.

## Key findings

- LSSE signals observed in all multilayer samples
- Power factor increased monotonically with layer number
- Maximum enhancement of ~28 times in the five-layer sample

## Abstract

For longitudinal spin Seebeck effect (LSSE) devices, a multilayer structure comprising ferromagnetic and nonmagnetic layers is expected to improve their thermoelectric power. In this study, we developed the fabrication method for alternately stacked yttrium-iron-garnet (YIG)/Pt multilayer films on a gadolinium gallium garnet (GGG) (110) substrate, GGG/[YIG(49 nm)/Pt(4 nm)]$_n$ ($n =$ 1 - 5) based on room-temperature sputtering and $ex$-$situ$ post-annealing method and we evaluated their structural and LSSE properties. The fabricated [YIG/Pt]$_n$ samples show flat YIG/Pt interfaces and almost identical saturation magnetization $M_{\rm s}$, although they contain polycrystalline YIG layers on Pt layers as well as single-crystalline YIG layers on GGG. In the samples, we observed clear LSSE signals and found that the LSSE thermoelectric power factor (PF) increases monotonically with increasing $n$; the PF of the [YIG/Pt]$_5$ sample is enhanced by a factor of $\sim 28$ compared to that of [YIG/Pt]$_1$. This work may provide a guideline for developing future multilayerbased LSSE devices.

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/1901.02129