Electronic thermal transport in strongly correlated multilayered nanostructures

TL;DR

This paper develops a many-body formalism for electronic thermal transport in multilayered nanostructures, extending the Jonson-Mahan theorem to inhomogeneous systems and applying it to thermoelectric measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a formalism that extends the Jonson-Mahan theorem to multilayered nanostructures, enabling accurate calculation of thermal transport coefficients.

Findings

Extended the Jonson-Mahan theorem to inhomogeneous systems

Provided a method to relate thermal-transport integrands by powers of frequency

Demonstrated applications to Peltier, Seebeck effects, and thermal conductance

Abstract

The formalism for a linear-response many-body treatment of the electronic contributions to thermal transport is developed for multilayered nanostructures. By properly determining the local heat-current operator, it is possible to show that the Jonson-Mahan theorem for the bulk can be extended to inhomogeneous problems, so the various thermal-transport coefficient integrands are related by powers of frequency (including all effects of vertex corrections when appropriate). We illustrate how to use this formalism by showing how it applies to measurements of the Peltier effect, the Seebeck effect, and the thermal conductance.