Thermoelectric properties of Weyl and Dirac semimetals

TL;DR

This paper investigates the thermoelectric properties of Weyl and Dirac semimetals, analyzing how disorder, interactions, doping, and external fields influence thermal conductivity and thermopower, revealing unique dependencies related to their linear electronic dispersion.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of thermoelectric effects in Weyl and Dirac semimetals using semiclassical Boltzmann and Kubo formalisms, including effects of interactions and magnetic fields.

Findings

Thermal conductivity and thermopower depend on chemical potential in characteristic ways.

Electron-electron interactions modify the Lorenz number.

Magnetic fields induce a quadratic increase in longitudinal thermal conductivity when aligned with the temperature gradient.

Abstract

We study the electronic contribution to the thermal conductivity and the thermopower of Weyl and Dirac semimetals using a semiclassical Boltzmann approach. We investigate the effect of various relaxation processes including disorder and interactions on the thermoelectric properties, and also consider doping away from the Weyl or Dirac point. We find that the thermal conductivity and thermopower have an interesting dependence on the chemical potential that is characteristic of the linear electronic dispersion, and that the electron-electron interactions modify the Lorenz number. For the interacting system, we also use the Kubo formalism to obtain the transport coefficients. We find exact agreement between the Kubo and Boltzmann approaches at high temperatures. We also consider the effect of electric and magnetic fields on the thermal conductivity in various orientations with respect to the temperature gradient. Notably, when the temperature gradient and magnetic field are parallel, we find a large contribution to the longitudinal thermal conductivity that is quadratic in the magnetic field strength, similar to the magnetic field dependence of the longitudinal electrical conductivity due to the presence of the chiral anomaly when no thermal gradient is present.