Review on thermoelectric properties of transition metal dichalcogenides

Abstract

Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are considered an advantageous alternative to their celebrated two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals akin compound, graphene, for a number of applications, especially those requiring a gapped and possibly tunable band structure. Thermoelectricity is one of the application fields where TMDs could indeed outperform graphene, thanks to their lower thermal conductivity, large effective masses, valley degeneracy, varied and tunable transport properties, as well as sensitivity of their band structures and phonon spectra to confinement. Yet, despite promising theoretical predictions, thermoelectric properties of TMDs have not been extensively investigated so far and a clear assessment of TMDs as viable thermoelectric materials, based on experimental results, is still missing. In this paper, we review the experimental findings of literature on thermoelectric properties of TMDs, to sort out the countless combinations of chemical compositions, doping, off-stoichiometry and sample forms which could potentially result in optimized and possibly competitive thermoelectric properties. Based on the experimental data of literature, we simulate the performance of an all-TMD thermoelectric device for practical application as a micron sized cryocooler or power generator.

Unformatted accepted manuscript

References in corpus (7)

• Thermoelectric and Magnetothermoelectric Transport Measurements of Graphene
• The thermopower and Nernst Effect in graphene in a magnetic field
• Large Thermoelectricity via Variable Range Hopping in Chemical Vapor Deposition Grown Single-layer MoS2
• Critical enhancement of thermopower in a chemically tuned polar semimetal MoTe${}_2$
• Thermopower and Unconventional Nernst in the Predicted Type-II Weyl Semi-metal WTe${}_2$
• Strain induced large enhancement of thermoelectric figure-of-merit ($ZT\sim 2$) in transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers ZrX${}_2$ (X= S, Se, Te)
• Giant enhancement of cryogenic thermopower by polar structural instability in the pressurized semimetal MoTe2

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Perturbation of charge density waves in 1T-TiSe${}_2$
• The heat equation for nanoconstrictions in 2D materials with Joule self-heating
• Investigation and field effect tuning of thermoelectric properties of SnSe2 flakes
• Enhanced thermopower in two-dimensional ruthenium dichalcogenides $Ru{X}_2$ (X = S, Se): a first-principles study