Thermoelectric transport properties of armchair graphene nanoribbon heterostructures

Abstract

In this paper, we numerically analyze the thermoelectric properties of recently synthesized graphene nanoribbon heterostructures that are obtained as extensions of pristine armchair graphene nanoribbons (AGNRs). After simulating their band structure through a nearest-neighbor tight-binding model, we use the Landauer formalism to calculate the necessary thermoelectric coefficients, with which we obtain the electrical conductance G, thermopower S, thermal conductance Ke, linear-response thermocurrent I_th=∆T = GS, and figure of merit ZT (using literature results for the phonon thermal conductance Kph), at room temperature. We then compare the results for the nanoribbon heterostructures with those for the pristine AGNR nanoribbons. The comparison shows that the metallic AGNRs become semiconducting (with much higher ZT values) after the inclusion of the extensions that transform them into heterostructures and that some heterostructures have higher values of ZT when compared to the semiconducting pristine AGNRs from which they have originated.

Effects of metallic electrodes on the thermoelectric properties of zigzag graphene nanoribbons with periodic vacancies

“…Recently, numerous studies have focused on twodimensional (2D) materials such as graphenes [13], and 2D transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) and oxides [13,14,16]. Quasi-1D graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) can now be fabricated with atomic precision by using the bottom-up approach [17]; this approach can yield complex graphene-based nanostructures on-demand for quantum device applications [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. The superlattices of zigzag GNRs (ZGNRs) behave as graphene QDAs (GQDAs) [29].…”