ICT2014 Abstracts

Nanostrucutres thermoelectric materials have become Strong candidates for TE energy conversion due to their size effect and energy filtering effect. For nanostructured TE material, it is very important to measure local TE properties for understanding local transport phenomena. But so far, it is still a very challenging topic. Scanning probe microscopy has now become a powerful tool for imaging microstructures and characterizing local physical properties with ultrahigh resolution. Here a novel scanning thermoelectric microscopy was developed based on the commercial atomic force microscope, its working principle and its application to in-situ excite and measure local thermoelectric properties will be described in details. This new probe technique shows a promising tool for characterizing local thermoelectric properties of nanoscale thermoelectric materials.