Thermopower scaling in conducting polymers

Abstract

By directly converting heat into electricity, thermoelectric effects provide a unique physical process from heat waste to energy harvesting. Requiring the highest possible power factor defined as α2σ, with the thermopower α and the electrical conductivity σ, such a technology necessitates the best knowledge of transport phenomena in order to be able to control and optimize both α and σ. While conducting polymers have already demonstrated their great potentiality with enhanced thermoelectric performance, the full understanding of the transport mechanisms in these compounds is still lacking. Here we show that the thermoelectric properties of one of the most promising conducting polymer, the poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) doped with tosylate ions (PEDOT-Tos), follows actually a very generic behavior with a scaling relation as α ∝ σ−1/4. Whereas conventional transport theories have failed to explain such an exponent, we demonstrate that it is in fact a characteristic of massless pseudo-relativistic quasiparticles, namely Dirac fermions, scattered by unscreened ionized impurities.