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November 22-23, 2018 | Paris, France
Journal of Materials Science and Nanotechnology | Volume: 2
Materials Physics and Materials Science
International Conference on
Modeling the Seebeck coefficient of GaAs in the limit of ballistic quantum transport
Karl Heinz Gresslehner
University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Austria
Several methods have been developed to determine the
Seebeck coefficient for thermoelectric materials. In this
work we investigate the Seebeck coefficient for n-GaAs
within the limit of ballistic quantum transport. The ballistic
quantum transport is calculated by the contact block
reduction (CBR) method which is a very efficient variant
of the nonequilibrium Green’s function formalism. A great
advantage of the CBR method is, that we can calculate
the Seebeck coefficient of inhomogeneous materials and
structures including heterostructures, functionally graded
thermoelectric materials and segmented materials self-
consistently. The calculations were carried out for a bulk
device geometry both for constant doping as well as graded
doping with a linear carrier concentration gradient. The left
side was taken as the cold and the right side as the hot side.
The current is determined by calculating the two different
electron distribution functions at the cold and hot contact.
Speaker Biography
Karl-Heinz Gresslehner have completed his PhD in the field of semiconductor physics in
1981 at the Johannes Kepler University, Linz. He was working more than 10 years in the
industry and 24 years as a teacher at a school for higher technical education. Since 2016 he
is a professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Upper Austria and is the head of the
research group “Thermoelectricity”.
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