2011/07/31 by David Sánchez, David Sanchez, Llorenç Serra +1 · 1 citation
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermoelectric Materials and Devices #Asymmetry #Condensed matter physics #Dephasing #Inelastic scattering #Materials science #Mesoscopic physics #Physics #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Quantum mechanics #Scattering #Seebeck coefficient #Thermoelectric effect #Topological Materials and Phenomena #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.84.201307
published as Phys. Rev. B 84, 201307(R) (2011) · 4+ pages, 2 figures and supplementary material. Published version
openalex publication_date 2011/11/14 · arxiv created 2011/11/16 · arxiv updated 2011/11/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We investigate the basic properties of the thermopower (Seebeck coefficient) of phase-coherent conductors under the influence of dephasing and inelastic processes. Transport across the system is caused by a voltage bias or a thermal gradient applied between two terminals. Inelastic scattering is modeled with the aid of an additional probe acting as an ideal potentiometer and thermometer. We find that inelastic scattering reduces the conductor's thermopower and, more unexpectedly, generates a magnetic field asymmetry in the Seebeck coefficient. The latter effect is shown to be a higher-order effect in the Sommerfeld expansion. We discuss our result by using two illustrative examples. First, we consider a generic mesoscopic system described within random matrix theory and demonstrate that thermopower fluctuations disappear quickly as the number of probe modes increases. Second, the asymmetry is explicitly calculated in the quantum limit of a ballistic microjunction. We find that asymmetric scattering strongly enhances the effect and discuss its dependence on temperature and Fermi energy.