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

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