Enhanced thermoelectric properties in nanowires of InAs modulated with multiple-stub structures

Abstract

The thermoelectric properties of InAs nanowires modulated with the multiple-stub structures are studied using the scattering-matrix method. Owing to the very large surface-to-volume ratio, both the phonon and electron transport sensitively depend on the geometric structure. Carrier energy filtering which locally distorts electronic density of states strongly enhances the thermopower. Thus optimized thermopower, together with the significant reduction of the phonon thermal conductance, yields the high thermoelectric figure of merit ZT to 0.3∼1.9.