Concept study for a high-efficiency nanowire-based thermoelectric

Abstract

Materials capable of highly efficient, direct thermal-to-electric energy conversion would have substantial economic potential. Theory predicts that thermoelectric efficiencies approaching the Carnot limit can be achieved at low temperatures in one-dimensional conductors that contain an energy filter such as a double-barrier resonant tunneling structure. The recent advances in growth techniques suggest that such devices can now be realized in heterostructured, semiconductor nanowires. Here we propose specific structural parameters for InAs/InP nanowires that may allow the experimental observation of near-Carnot efficient thermoelectric energy conversion in a single nanowire at low temperature.

References in corpus (4)

• The Addition Spectrum of a Lateral Dot from Coulomb and Spin Blockade Spectroscopy
• Reversible thermoelectric nanomaterials
• Reversible quantum Brownian heat engines for electrons
• Efficiency in nanostructured thermionic and thermoelectric devices

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• Lineshape of the thermopower of quantum dots
• Measuring Temperature Gradients over Nanometer Length Scales
• Nonlinear thermoelectric response due to energy-dependent transport properties of a quantum dot
• Hot Carrier Extraction Using Energy Selective Contacts and Its Impact on the Limiting Efficiency of a Hot Carrier Solar Cell
• Quantum-dot thermometry
• Thermoelectric transport of GaAs, InP, and PbTe: Hybrid functional with $k\cdot p$ interpolation versus scissor-corrected generalized gradient approximation
• Using Activated Transport in Parallel Nanowires for Energy Harvesting and Hot Spot Cooling
• Higher-order Efficiency Bound and Its Application to Nonlinear Nano-thermoelectrics
• Filtering electrons by mode coupling in finite semiconductor superlattices
• Efficiency at maximum power of thermoelectric heat engines with the symmetric semiconductor superlattice
• Heating without heat: thermodynamics of passive energy filters between finite systems
• Current noise in quantum dot thermoelectric engines
• Angle-dependent resonant tunneling and thermoelectric energy management in a hybrid 1D-2D-1D semiconductor nanostructure