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Energy waste is a severe bottleneck in the supply of sustainable energy to any modern economy. Besides developing new energy sources, the global energy crisis can be alleviated by re-utilizing the waste heat. In this talk, I will first introduce some background of harnessing the thermal energy by the thermoelectrics, spin caloritronics, and phononics. Then, in the second part, I would like to share with you some of my recent discoveries about the rectification and negative differential spin Seebeck effects, exemplified in metal/magnetic insulator interfaces and magnon tunneling junctions. These properties lead us to the novel devices, such as thermal-driven spin diode and transistor in the absence of electric transports. I call them spin Seebeck diode and transistor. These findings imply that a spin computer driven by waste heat might not be a dream in the future, which offer us new opportunities to achieve the smart control of energy and information at nanoscale.

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Jie Ren, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Seminarraum Theoretische Physik
Contact: not specified