Thermoelectricity in a Quasiperiodic Lattice Beyond Nearest-Neighbor Electron Hopping

A new route to obtain a large figure of merit (>1) is reported, for the first time, by considering a one-dimensional quasiperiodic lattice where an electron can hop beyond usual nearest-neighbor sites. A finite positional correlation is imposed among the constituent lattice sites, following the well-known Aubry-Andre-Harper (AAH) form. In the presence of second-neighbor hopping, the AAH lattice exhibits energy dependent mobility edge which plays the central role for efficient energy conversion. Employing a tight-binding framework, all the thermoelectric quantities are computed based on the standard nonequilibrium Green's function formalism. The analysis can be utilized to investigate thermoelectric phenomena in similar kinds of other aperiodic systems possessing higher order electron hopping.