Giant thermoelectric effects in a proximity-coupled superconductor-ferromagnet device

The usually negligibly small thermoelectric effects in superconducting heterostructures can be boosted dramatically due to the simultaneous effect of spin-dependent scattering and spin-filtering. Build on our idea [Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{110}, 047002 (2013)], we propose realistic setups to measure local thermoelectric effects in superconductor heterostructures. We focus on the Seebeck-effect which is a direct measure of the local thermoelectric response and find that a thermopower $\sim100\mu V/K$ can be achieved if a third terminal allows to drain the thermal current. A measurement of the thermopower can furthermore be used to determine quantitatively the spin-dependent interface parameters that induce the spin splitting. For applications in nano-cooling we discuss the figure of merit that we found to exceed one for realistic parameters.