The transport and coupling of the heat, charge, and spin carriers in a solid-state system can be particularly complicated in materials with atomic scale complexities, such as incommensurate crystals, magnetic materials, and quasi-one-dimensional systems. However, these transport mechanisms are important in determining the strength of various thermoelectric and spincaloritronic effects, as well as the performance and reliability of nanoscale electronics. This talk will discuss the transport of heat in complex structured materials at nano and micron scales, comparable to the relaxation lengths of the relevant energy carriers. Some of the fundamental questions about the interactions between energy, charge, and spin carriers in the incommensurate thermoelectric material higher manganese silicide (HMS) and the magnetic insulator yttrium iron garnet (YIG) will be discussed. These questions are addressed through a number of experimental approaches using thermal conductance and thermoelectric property measurements of suspended nanostructures, inelastic neutron scattering, Brillouin light scattering, and electron microscopy.
Annie Weathers received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 2016 and 2012, and her B.S. in Physics from NYU in 2010. She is a recipient of the Ben Streetman Prize for outstanding graduate research in microelectronics, a recipient of a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and was selected as a 2017 Caltech Young Investigator Lecturer in Engineering and Applied Science. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UT Austin in Prof. Li Shi’s group, and will be starting as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT Lincoln Labs in May 2017 in the microfluidics group.
