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arXiv · 2508.11240

Metallic Contact Contributions in Thermal Hall Conductivity Measurements

Hongyu Ma·Xuesong Hu·Junren Shi
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Abstract

We investigate the influence of metallic contacts on thermal Hall measurements. By analyzing typical measurement setups, we show that heat currents bypassing through metallic contacts could generate non-negligible thermal Hall signals. We find that contributions from metallic contacts with thicknesses on the order of 10$^{-2}$ of sample widths can approximately replicate experimental observations across different materials in both temperature dependence and magnitude, assuming silver contacts with a conductivity of $10^{8}~\mathrm{S/m}$. Our analysis underscores the need to minimize metallic contact effects in thermal Hall measurements, which can be achieved by optimizing measurement configurations.

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Hongyu Ma, Xuesong Hu, Junren Shi. 2025-08-15. Metallic Contact Contributions in Thermal Hall Conductivity Measurements. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11240

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