In recent years, more and more approaches to environmental and energy issues have been taken, and it is required to develop clean and reliable energy sources and power-saving electronic devices. Spintronics, the new electronic technology which actively exploits electron spins, is expected to develop novel principles to drive electric and magnetic devices and to convert energy to a usable form. A lot of research on spintronics has thus been conducted all over the world. However, although most of the spintronics functions are driven by spin currents, flows of electron spin-angular momentum, the methods for generating and controlling spin currents have been very limited. In 2008, we discovered a new phenomenon called a "spin Seebeck effect", which refers to the conversion of a heat current into a spin voltage in a ferromagnet/paramagnet junction. Since the spin Seebeck effect appears not only in metals and semiconductors but also in magnetic insulators, it enables the construction of "insulator-based thermoelectric generators" in combination with the inverse spin Hall effect, which was impossible if only conventional thermoelectric technology was used. The purposes of our research project are to realize efficient thermoelectric conversion by using the spin Seebeck effect and to develop innovative energy-harvesting systems and spin-based energy-saving technologies with very low environmental burdens.

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URL: URL: http://saitoh.imr.tohoku.ac.jp/

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