Towards Optimizing Width Modulation for Maximum Thermoelectric Efficiency

Maximizing thermoelectric efficiency is typically addressed as identical to minimizing parasitic thermal conduction. Such an approach relies on the assumption that the adopted strategy mainly affects phonons, leaving electrons intact, and is not justified in many cases of non-uniform nanostructures such as width-modulated nanowaveguides, where both electrons and phonons are significantly affected by width modulation. Here, we address the question of maximizing the thermoelectric efficiency of this class of metamaterials by exploring the effect of the modulation extent on both electron and phonon transport. We investigated the effect of increasing modulation degree on the thermoelectric efficiency, considering the cases of (a) a two-QD modulation and (b) multiple-QD modulations in periodic and aperiodic sequences. We show that the thermoelectric efficiency depends on the coupling between the modulation units and the interplay between periodicity and aperiodicity in the modulation profile. We reveal that the maximization of the thermoelectric power factor is for periodic width-modulation, whereas the maximization of the thermoelectric efficiency is for aperiodic width-modulation profiles that form quasi-localized states for electrons. Our work provides new insight that can be used to optimize width modulation for maximum thermoelectric efficiency.