High-temperature thermoelectric transport at small scales: Thermal generation, transport and recombination of minority carriers

摘要: Thermoelectric transport in semiconductors is usually considered under small thermal gradients and when it dominated by the role of majority carriers. Not much known about effects that arise large can be established high-temperature, small-scale electronic devices. Here, we report a surprisingly asymmetry self-heating symmetric highly doped silicon microwires with hottest region shifted along direction minority carrier flow. We show at sufficiently high temperatures strong (~1 K/nm), energy generation, recombination carriers these structures becomes very significant overcomes convective opposite direction. These results are important for high-temperature nanoelectronics such as emerging phase-change memory devices which also employ semiconducting materials local reach ~1000 K ~10–100 K/nm.