Study of thermoelectric properties of indium nitride nanowire

In this paper, we studied the thermoelectric properties of a free-standing InN nanowire with write size ranging from 6 to 100nm. With elastic continuum model, we calculated the phonon dispersion curves to obtain the phonon group velocity. TheCallaway model has been applied to obtain the temperature-dependent thermal conductivity. We employed the Monte Carlo method to obtain the mobility and electrical conductivity with different doping concentration and temperature Finally, the figures of merit ZT have been obtained by the combination of the electrical and thermal properties, of InN nanowire. Our results suggest that the thermoelectric properties of InN nanowire are strongly influenced by the carrier density, temperature and nanowire size. The optimization condition or designing the thermoelectric device has been studied in this paper. (C) 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag Gmbh & Co. KGaA, Weinheim