Thermoelectric transport coefficients of a Dirac electron gas in high magnetic fields

TL;DR

This paper investigates thermoelectric transport in a 3D Dirac electron gas under high magnetic fields, highlighting the effects of mass and impurities on measurable transport coefficients, with implications for Dirac materials.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of how mass and impurity scattering influence thermoelectric properties in high magnetic fields, extending understanding beyond massless Dirac fermions.

Findings

Electric conductivity remains qualitatively unchanged with finite mass.

Mass term significantly alters Seebeck and Nernst coefficients.

Low temperature approximation validity increases with magnetic field strength.

Abstract

We study the thermoelectric transport properties of a three-dimensional massive relativistic fermion gas with screened Coulomb impurities in high magnetic fields where only the lowest Landau levels contribute to the transport. Our results can be applied to experimental results of gapless and gapped Dirac materials. We focus on the effects of the mass term and we show the main differences that arise compared to the massless Dirac fermions. The different behavior is shown to be relevant at higher magnetic fields. The calculations are performed in the framework of the linear response theory using the exact quantum mechanical solution of the system in a constant magnetic field. We prove that the Mott formula and the Wiedemann-Franz law are valid at low temperatures and use them to calculate the thermoelectric transport coefficients. We show that the temperature range where the low temperature approximation is valid increases with increasing magnetic fields. The magnetic field dependence of measurable quantities (i.e. conductivity, Seebeck coefficient, Nernst coefficient and thermal conductivity) strongly depend on the magnetic field dependence of the scattering rate, thus the result relies on the proper treatment of the impurities. In this work they are included through the first Born approximation using screened charged impurities as impurity potential. We show that the electric conductivity does not change qualitatively in the case of finite mass term. On the other hand we find that the mass term causes significantly different behavior in the Seebeck and Nernst coefficients.