Electronic thermal conductivity at high temperatures: Violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law in narrow band metals

TL;DR

This paper investigates the electronic thermal conductivity in narrow band metals at high temperatures, revealing violations of the Wiedemann-Franz law due to band width effects, using quantum Monte-Carlo and semiclassical methods.

Contribution

It introduces two methods for calculating electronic thermal conductivity and demonstrates the violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law in narrow band metals at high temperatures.

Findings

kappa(T) saturates for Nb, consistent with experiments

kappa(T) decreases as T^{-3/2} for A3C60 at high T

Wiedemann-Franz law is violated in narrow band metals at high T

Abstract

We study the electronic part of the thermal conductivity kappa of metals. We present two methods for calculating kappa, a quantum Monte-Carlo (QMC) method and a method where the phonons but not the electrons are treated semiclassically (SC). We compare the two methods for a model of alkali-doped C60, A3C60, and show that they agree well. We then mainly use the SC method, which is simpler and easier to interpret. We perform SC calculations for Nb for large temperatures T and find that kappa increases with T as kappa(T)=a+bT, where a and b are constants, consistent with a saturation of the mean free path, l, and in good agreement with experiment. In contrast, we find that for A3C60, kappa(T) decreases with T for very large T. We discuss the reason for this qualitatively in the limit of large T. We give a quantum-mechanical explanation of the saturation of l for Nb and derive the Wiedemann-Franz law in the limit of T much smaller than W, where W is the band width. In contrast, due to the small W of A3C60, the assumption T much smaller than W can be violated. We show that this leads to kappa(T) \sim T^{-3/2} for very large T and a strong violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law.