15 research outputs found
Electronic thermal conductivity at high temperatures: Violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law in narrow band metals
We study the electronic part of the thermal conductivity kappa of metals. We
present two methods for calculating kappa, a quantum Monte-Carlo (QMC) method
and a method where the phonons but not the electrons are treated
semiclassically (SC). We compare the two methods for a model of alkali-doped
C60, A3C60, and show that they agree well. We then mainly use the SC method,
which is simpler and easier to interpret. We perform SC calculations for Nb for
large temperatures T and find that kappa increases with T as kappa(T)=a+bT,
where a and b are constants, consistent with a saturation of the mean free
path, l, and in good agreement with experiment. In contrast, we find that for
A3C60, kappa(T) decreases with T for very large T. We discuss the reason for
this qualitatively in the limit of large T. We give a quantum-mechanical
explanation of the saturation of l for Nb and derive the Wiedemann-Franz law in
the limit of T much smaller than W, where W is the band width. In contrast, due
to the small W of A3C60, the assumption T much smaller than W can be violated.
We show that this leads to kappa(T) \sim T^{-3/2} for very large T and a strong
violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure