Annealing effect on the thermal conductivity of thermoelectric ZnTe nanowires

Abstract

We report here the effect of thermal annealing on the thermal conductivity of ZnTe nanowires measured on a microfabricated suspended device. Molecular dynamics simulation was used to calculate the effect of contacts on the measurements at different temperatures and to estimate the intrinsic nanowire thermal conductivity values. A decrease in thermal conductivity was observed after each thermal annealing step at all the measured temperatures. Thermal annealing can be a potential method to improve the thermoelectric efficiency of nanowires, not only by enhancing the electrical conduction as demonstrated before, but also by suppressing the thermal transport at the same time. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.