A microscopic mechanism for increasing thermoelectric efficiency

We study the coupled particle and energy transport in a prototype model of interacting one-dimensional system: the disordered hard-point gas, for which numerical data suggest that the thermoelectric figure of merit ZT diverges with the system size. This result is explained in terms of a microscopic mechanism, namely the local equilibrium is characterized by the emergence of a broad stationary modified Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution, of width much larger than the mean velocity of the particle flow. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.