  Arising from the interplay between charge, spin and orbital of electrons,
spin-orbit torque (SOT) has attracted immense interest in the past decade.
Despite vast progress, the existing quantification methods of SOT still have
their respective restrictions on the magnetic anisotropy, the entanglement
between SOT effective fields, and the artifacts from the thermal gradient and
the planar Hall effect, etc. Thus, accurately characterizing SOT across diverse
samples remains as a critical need. In this work, with the aim of removing the
afore-mentioned restrictions, thus enabling the universal SOT quantification,
we report the characterization of the sign and amplitude of SOT by angular
measurements. We first validate the applicability of our angular
characterization in a perpendicularly magnetized Pt/Co-Ni heterostructure by
showing excellent agreements to the results of conventional quantification
methods. Remarkably, the thermoelectric effects, i.e., the anomalous Nernst
effect (ANE) arising from the temperature gradient can be self-consistently
disentangled and quantified from the field dependence of the angular
characterization. The superiority of this angular characterization has been
further demonstrated in a Cu/CoTb/Cu sample with large ANE but negligible SOT,
and in a Pt/Co-Ni sample with weak perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA), for
which the conventional quantification methods are not applicable and even yield
fatal error. By providing a comprehensive and versatile way to characterize SOT
and thermoelectric effects in diverse heterostructures, our results pave the
important foundation for the spin-orbitronic study as well as the
interdisciplinary research of thermal spintronic.
