Thermoelectric Effects and Topological Insulators

Abstract

The recent discovery of topological insulator (TI) offers new opportunities for the development of thermoelectrics, because many TIs (like Bi${}_2$Te${}_3$) are excellent thermoelectric (TE) materials. In this review, we will first describe the general TE properties of TIs and show that the coexistence of the bulk and boundary states in TIs introduces unusual TE properties, including strong size effects and anomalous Seebeck effect. Importantly, the TE figure of merit $zT$ of TIs is no longer an intrinsic property, but depends strongly on the geometric size. The geometric parameters of two-dimensional TIs can be tuned to enhance $zT$ to be significantly greater than 1. Then a few proof-of-principle experiments on three-dimensional TIs will be discussed, which observed unconventional TE phenomena that are closely related to the topological nature of the materials. However, current experiments indicate that the metallic surface states, if their advantage of high mobility is not fully utilized, would be detrimental to TE performance. Finally we provide an outlook for future work on topological materials, which offers great possibilities to discover exotic TE effects and may lead to significant breakthroughs in improving $zT$.

References in corpus (39)

• Topological Insulators
• Topological insulators and superconductors
• Quantum Spin Hall Effect in Graphene
• Quantum Spin Hall Effect and Topological Phase Transition in HgTe Quantum Wells
• Quantum Spin Hall Insulator State in HgTe Quantum Wells
• Discovery (theoretical prediction and experimental observation) of a large-gap topological-insulator class with spin-polarized single-Dirac-cone on the surface
• Epitaxial Growth of Two-Dimensional Stanene
• Large-gap quantum spin Hall insulators in tin films
• The quantum spin Hall effect and topological insulators
• p-type Bi2Se3 for topological insulator and low temperature thermoelectric applications
• Thermoelectric effect in molecular electronics
• Enhanced Thermoelectric Performance and Anomalous Seebeck Effects in Topological Insulators
• Prediction of Near-Room-Temperature Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect on Honeycomb Materials
• Thermal and Thermoelectric Properties of Graphene
• In-plane transport and enhanced thermoelectric performance in thin films of the topological insulators Bi_2Te_3 and Bi_2Se_3
• Functionalized Germanene as a Prototype of Large-Gap Two-Dimensional Topological Insulators
• Intrinsic anisotropy of thermal conductance in graphene nanoribbons
• Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect with Higher Plateaus
• Remarkable Reduction of Thermal Conductivity in Silicon Nanotubes
• Two-dimensional time-reversal-invariant topological superconductivity in a doped quantum spin Hall insulator
• Large-Gap Quantum Spin Hall States in Stanene Grown on Substrate
• Impacts of Atomistic Coating on Thermal Conductivity of Germanium Nanowires
• Thermoelectric properties of Bi2Te3 atomic quintuple thin films
• Nonequilibrium Green's function method for phonon-phonon interaction and ballistic-diffusive thermal transport
• Phonon Coherent Resonance and Its Effect on Thermal Transport In Core-Shell Nanowires
• Giant thermoelectric effect in graphene-based topological insulators with nanopores
• Thermoelectricity by Perfectly Conducting Channels in Quantum Spin Hall Systems
• Topological States in Ferromagnetic CdO/EuO Superlattices and Quantum Wells
• Maximizing the thermoelectric performance of topological insulator Bi2Te3 films in the few-quintuple layer regime
• Impact of the Topological Surface State on the Thermoelectric Transport in Sb${}_2$Te${}_3$ Thin Films
• A Universal Gauge for Thermal Conductivity of Silicon Nanowires With Different Cross Sectional Geometries
• Dirac Fermion in Strongly-Bound Graphene Systems
• Quantum Spin Hall and Quantum Anomalous Hall States Realized in Junction Quantum Wells
• Thermoelectric performance of classical topological insulator nanowires
• Disentangling the magnetoelectric and thermoelectric transport in topological insulator thin films
• Converting normal insulators into topological insulators via tuning orbital levels
• Signature of the topological surface state in the thermoelectric properties of Bi${}_2$Te${}_3$
• Thermoelectric transport of perfectly conducting channels in two- and three-dimensional topological insulators
• Tunable Thermal Conduction in Graphane Nanoribbons

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Revealing Optical Transitions and Carrier Recombination Dynamics within the Bulk Band Structure of Bi2Se3
• Thermal engineering in low-dimensional quantum devices: a tutorial review of nonequilibrium Green's function methods
• Quantum Transport and Potential of Topological States for Thermoelectricity in Bi${}_2$Te${}_3$ Thin Films
• Intrinsic Contribution to Non-linear Thermoelectric Effect
• First-principles discovery of novel quantum physics and materials: From theory to experiment
• Topological advantage for adsorbate chemisorption on conjugated chains