Hopping thermoelectric transport in finite systems: boundary effects

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that in finite hopping systems, thermopower is primarily determined by boundary effects, with implications for thermoelectric transport properties and their statistical distributions.

Contribution

It reveals that thermopower in finite hopping systems is boundary-dominated, introduces the distribution of thermopower, and shows boundary effects influence thermal conductance in three-terminal setups.

Findings

Thermopower is governed by sample edges in finite systems.

Distribution width of thermopower approaches a finite limit with increasing sample length.

Boundary effects can dominate thermal conductance when usual conductance is small.

Abstract

It is shown that for the hopping regime, the thermopowers in both finite two-terminal and three-terminal systems are governed by the edges of the samples. This is due to the fact that the energy transfer between a transport electron and a conducting terminal is determined by the site most strongly coupled to that terminal. One-dimensional systems with both nearest-neighbor and variable-range transport as well as certain types of two-dimensional systems, are considered. For a given sample, the changes in the thermopowers due to modifying the bulk are quite limited, compared with those of the conductance. When the small thermopower changes exist, their average over a large ensemble of mesoscopic samples will vanish. We also obtain the distribution of the thermopower in such an ensemble and show that its width approaches a finite limit with increasing sample length. This contrasts with the distribution of conductances in such systems, whose width vanishes in the long sample limit. Finally, we find that the thermal conductances in the three-terminal case have a boundary-dominated contribution, due to non-percolating conduction paths. This contribution can become dominant when the usual conductance is small enough. All our theoretical statements are backed by numerical computations.