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Synthesis And Spectroscopic Characterization Of Nanostructured Thermoelectric Materials, Jason Reppert

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Bismuth in the bulk form is a semimetal with a rhombohedral structure. It has a small band overlap between the conduction and valence bands and a highly anisotropic electron effective-mass tensor. Thermoelectric materials, in which one of the three dimensions is in the nanometer regime, exhibit unique quantum confinement properties and have generated much interest in recent years. Theoretical investigations have suggested that nanowires with diameters ≤ 10 nm will possess a figure-of-merit ZT > 2. Prior to this study, it has been shown that Bi nanowires with small enough diameters (~10 nm), prepared via the pulsed laser vaporization method, undergo …