Enhancement of thermoelectric performance in strongly correlated multilayered nanostructures

We illustrate how the electronic charge reconstruction near the interfaces of metal–strongly-correlatedbarrier–metal devices can lead to a significant enhancement of the thermoelectric response due to the breaking of particle-hole symmetry. We show how one can achieve effective Seebeck coefficients larger than 150 μV/K and effective electronic figures-of-merit ZT higher than 1. Our work shows that electronic thermoelectric transport properties can be significantly enhanced from inhomogeneities created by the rearrangement of charge near the interfaces, and that bulk figures-of-merit cannot generically be employed to determine the figure-of-merit of a multilayered nanostructure.