Spin thermopower in the overscreened Kondo model

Abstract: We study the spin thermopower in the two-channel spin-1/2 Kondo model which exhibits the phenomenon of impurity spin overscreening and non-Fermi-liquid properties. While magnetic field lower than the Kondo temperature does not strongly polarize the impurity spin, we show that it nevertheless strongly affects the low-energy part of the spectral function. In turn, this leads to characteristic saturation of the spin Seebeck coefficient at the value of 0.388kB/|e| at T ~ T*, where T* ~ B^2/TK is the scale of the crossover between the intermediate-temperature non-Fermi-liquid regime and the low-temperature Fermi-liquid regime. We show that measuring the spin thermopower at low magnetic fields would provide a sensitive test for distinguishing regular Fermi liquid, singular Fermi liguid, and non-Fermi liquid behaviour in nanodevices.