Investigating enhanced thermoelectric performance of graphene-based nano-structures

Abstract

Recently, it has been demonstrated that graphene nano-ribbons (GNRs) exhibit superior thermoelectric performance compared to graphene sheets. However, the underlying mechanism behind this enhancement has not been systematically investigated and significant opportunity remains for further enhancement of the thermoelectric performance of GNRs by optimizing their charge carrier concentration. In this work, we modulate the carrier concentration of graphene-based nano-structures using a gate voltage and investigate the resulting carrier-concentration-dependent thermoelectric parameters using the Boltzmann transport equations. We investigate the effect of energy dependent scattering time and the r..