UC Berkeley

We introduce a new model for quasi-one-dimensional materials, motivated by intriguing but not yet well-understood experiments that have shown two-dimensional polymer films to be promising materials for thermoelectric devices. We consider a two-dimensional material consisting of many one-dimensional systems, each treated as a Luttinger liquid, with weak (incoherent) coupling between them. This approximation of strong interactions within each one-dimensional chain and weak coupling between them is the "quasiatomic limit." We find integral expressions for the (interchain) transport coefficients, including the electrical and thermal conductivities and the thermopower, and we extract their power law dependencies on temperature. Luttinger liquid physics is manifested in a violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law; the Lorenz number is larger than the Fermi liquid value by a factor between γ2 and γ4, where γ≥1 is a measure of the electron-electron interaction strength in the system.