Non-Hermitian thermoelectric transport in graphene: Tunable anomalous transmission through complex barriers

TL;DR

This paper explores how complex (non-Hermitian) barriers in graphene influence thermoelectric transport, revealing tunable transmission, modified conductance, and potential for enhanced thermoelectric efficiency.

Contribution

It provides an exact analysis of non-Hermitian effects on graphene transport, demonstrating how imaginary potentials alter scattering, conductance, and thermoelectric properties.

Findings

Imaginary barriers break flux conservation, leading to gain or loss in transmission.

Resonant channels are selectively attenuated or amplified by the imaginary part.

Gain enhances conductance and thermoelectric figure of merit, loss suppresses thermal conductance.

Abstract

We investigate thermoelectric transport in monolayer graphene across a finite complex barrier within a Landauer scattering framework. Solving the Dirac-Weyl problem exactly, we show that the imaginary part of the barrier renders the scattering matrix nonunitary and replaces the usual Hermitian flux conservation by a generalized flux-balance relation determined by the net gain or loss inside the barrier. In the Hermitian limit, the standard graphene $n$-$p$-$n$ barrier behavior is recovered, including perfect transmission at normal incidence and Fabry-Perot-type resonances. For a finite imaginary part, however, the same resonant channels are selectively attenuated or amplified, which significantly modifies both the angular response and the conductance profile. We further show that the lead-resolved conductances become dependent on the bias partition, providing a direct signature of the breakdown of gauge invariance in the effective two-terminal response. At finite temperature, the exact linear-response coefficients reveal a clear trade-off controlled by the imaginary part of the barrier: gain enhances both the electrical and thermal conductances, whereas loss suppresses the thermal conductance more efficiently and yields the largest thermoelectric figure of merit within the parameter range considered. These results demonstrate that complex barriers extend the range of transport behaviors accessible in graphene beyond the usual Hermitian $n$-$p$-$n$ junction. They also suggest a practical interpretation of the imaginary potential as an effective reduced description of unresolved source-sink channels or additional probes coupled to the device, particularly when a fully microscopic model of the environment is not available.