Atomic and molecular junctions are an emerging class of thermoelectric materials that exploit quantum confinement effects to obtain an enhanced figure of merit. An important feature in such nanoscale systems is that the electron and heat transport become highly sensitive to the atomic configurations. Here we report the characterization of geometry-sensitive thermoelectricity in atom-sized junct...

Thermoelectric materials are used as solid-state heat pumps and as power generators. The low efficiency of devices based on conventional bulk thermoelectric materials confines their applications to niches in which their advantages in compactness and controllability outweigh that drawback. Recent developments in nanotechnologies have led to the development of thermoelectric nano-materials with d...

Transverse thermoelectric elements have the potential to decouple the electric current and the heat flow, which could lead to new designs of thermoelectric devices. While many theoretical and experimental studies of transverse thermoelectricity have focused on layered structures, this work examines composite materials with aligned fibrous inclusions. A simplified mathematical model was derived ...

With a projection of nearly doubling up the world population by 2050, we need wide variety of renewable and clean energy sources to meet the increased energy demand. Solar energy is considered as the leading promising alternate energy source with the pertinent challenge of off sunshine period and uneven worldwide distribution of usable sun light. Although thermoelectricity is considered as a re...

Molecular junction is a chemically-defined nanostructure whose discrete electronic states are expected to render enhanced thermoelectric figure of merit suitable for energy-harvesting applications. Here, we report on geometrical dependence of thermoelectricity in metal-molecule-metal structures. We performed simultaneous measurements of the electrical conductance and thermovoltage of aromatic m...

The electric field in an extended phase of a liquid electrolyte exposed to a temperature gradient is attributed to different thermophoretic mobilities of the ion species. As shown herein, such Soret-type ion thermodiffusion is not required to induce thermoelectricity even in the simplest electrolyte if it is confined between charged walls. The space charge of the electric double layer leads to ...