A microscopic mechanism for increasing thermoelectric efficiency
Statistical Mechanics
2010-10-26 v1 Chaotic Dynamics
Abstract
We study the coupled particle and energy transport in a prototype model of interacting one-dimensional system: the disordered hard-point gas, for which numerical data suggest that the thermoelectric figure of merit ZT diverges with the system size. This result is explained in terms of a microscopic mechanism, namely the local equilibrium is characterized by the emergence of a broad stationary "modified Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution", of width much larger than the mean velocity of the particle flow.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1005.4744,
title = {A microscopic mechanism for increasing thermoelectric efficiency},
author = {Keiji Saito and Giuliano Benenti and Giulio Casati},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1005.4744},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
18 pages, 4 figures