Large Seebeck magnetic anisotropy in thin Co films embedded in Cu determined by ab initio investigations

The longitudinal thermopower of a Cu/Co/Cu trilayer system exhibits an oscillatory dependence on the thickness of the Co layer, a behavior related to the formation of quantum well states in the minority spin channel. In addition, it is found to be very sensitive to a switching between an in-plane and out-of-plane magnetization. The resulting magnetothermopower (MTP) is therefore much larger than anticipated from the conventional anisotropic magnetoresistance (AMR). Our calculations establish a direct connection between the magnitude of the MTP signal and the asymmetry of the AMR around the Fermi energy. An enhancement of MTP based on this understanding may offer the possibility of implementing an efficient spin read-out thermoelectric device based on a single ferromagnetic layer.