Thermoelectricity of interacting particles: A numerical approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Monte Carlo simulation method to compute thermopower in interacting particle systems, demonstrating that thermoelectric efficiency improves with system size in momentum-conserving models.

Contribution

It presents a novel numerical approach for calculating thermopower in interacting systems, validated on diatomic chains and Coulomb gases, with implications for thermoelectric material design.

Findings

Thermopower can be accurately computed using Monte Carlo simulations.

Thermoelectric figure of merit increases linearly with system size.

Momentum-conserving systems show consistent theoretical behavior in simulations.

Abstract

A method for computing the thermopower in interacting systems is proposed. This approach, which relies on Monte Carlo simulations, is illustrated first for a diatomic chain of hard-point elastically colliding particles and then in the case of a one-dimensional gas with (screened) Coulomb interparticle interaction. Numerical simulations up to $N>10^4$ particles confirm the general theoretical arguments for momentum-conserving systems and show that the thermoelectric figure of merit increases linearly with the system size.