Local Spin Seebeck Imaging with a Scanning Thermal Probe

We present the results of an experiment to locally resolve the spin Seebeck effect in a high-quality yttrium iron garnet--Pt sample. We achieve this by using a locally heated scanning thermal probe to generate a highly local nonequilibrium spin current. To support our experimental results, we also present a model based on the nonequilibrium thermodynamic approach that is in a good agreement with the experimental findings. To further corroborate our results, we index the locally resolved spin Seebeck effect with that of the local magnetization texture by magnetic force microscopy and correlate corresponding regions. We hypothesize that this technique allows imaging of magnetization textures within the magnon diffusion length and hence characterization of spin-caloritronic materials at the nanoscale.