Enhanced Thermoelectric Performance and Anomalous Seebeck Effects in Topological Insulators

Improving the thermoelectric figure of merit zT is one of the greatest challenges in material science. The recent discovery of topological insulators (TIs) offers new promise in this prospect. In this work, we demonstrate theoretically that zT is strongly size dependent in TIs, and the size parameter can be tuned to enhance zT to be significantly greater than 1. Furthermore, we show that the lifetime of the edge states in TIs is strongly energy dependent, leading to large and anomalous Seebeck effects with an opposite sign to the Hall effect. These striking properties make TIs a promising material for thermoelectric science and technology.