Thermoelectric efficiency of topological insulators in a magnetic field

Abstract

We study the thermoelectric properties of three-dimensional topological insulators in magnetic fields with many holes (or pores) in the bulk. We find that at high density of these holes in the transport direction the thermoelectric figure of merit, ZT, can be large due to the contribution of the topologically protected conducting surfaces and the suppressed phonon thermal conductivity. By applying an external magnetic field a subgap can be induced in the surface states spectrum. We show that the thermoelectric efficiency can be controlled by this tunable subgap leading to the values of ZT much greater than 1. Such high values of ZT for reasonable system parameters and its tunability by magnetic field make this system a strong candidate for applications in heat management of nanodevices, especially at low temperatures.

9 pages, 4 figures, Proceedings of MMM 2011

References in corpus (4)

• A topological Dirac insulator in a quantum spin Hall phase : Experimental observation of first strong topological insulator
• Topological origin of subgap conductance in insulating bilayer graphene
• Two-dimensional Dirac fermions in a topological insulator: transport in the quantum limit
• Holey topological thermoelectrics

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Spin Seebeck Power Conversion
• Disentangling the magnetoelectric and thermoelectric transport in topological insulator thin films
• Thermoelectric properties of 3D topological insulator: Direct observation of topological surface and its gap opened states
• Materials analysis and focused ion beam nanofabrication of topological insulator Bi2Se3
• Thermoelectric properties of an ultra-thin topological insulator