Issue |
EPL
Volume 141, Number 2, January 2023
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 26002 | |
Number of page(s) | 7 | |
Section | Condensed matter and materials physics | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/acb009 | |
Published online | 19 January 2023 |
Fluctuation-dissipation in thermoelectric sensors
1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University - Montréal, Québec, H3A 0E9, Canada
2 Institute for Metallic Materials, IFW Dresden - 01069 Dresden, Germany
3 Département de physique et Institut Quantique, Université de Sherbrooke - Sherbrooke, Québec, J1K 2R1, Canada
4 Faculty of Physics, Universität Bielefeld - 33501 Bielefeld, Germany
(a) E-mail: thomas.szkopek@mcgill.ca (corresponding author)
Received: 5 September 2022
Accepted: 4 January 2023
Thermoelectric materials exhibit correlated transport of charge and heat. The Johnson-Nyquist noise formula 4kBTR for the spectral density of voltage fluctuations accounts for fluctuations associated solely with Ohmic dissipation. Applying the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, we generalize the Johnson-Nyquist formula for thermoelectrics, finding an enhanced voltage fluctuation spectral density 4kBTR(1 + ZDT) at frequencies below a thermal cut-off frequency fT, where ZDT is the dimensionless thermoelectric device figure of merit. The origin of the enhancement in voltage noise is thermoelectric coupling of temperature fluctuations. We use a wideband , integrated thermoelectric micro-device to experimentally confirm our findings. Measuring the ZDT enhanced voltage noise, we experimentally resolve temperature fluctuations with a root mean square amplitude of
at a mean temperature of 295 K. We find that thermoelectric devices can be used for thermometry with sufficient resolution to measure the fundamental temperature fluctuations described by the fluctuation-dissipation theorem.
© 2023 The author(s)
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