The Thermoelectric Properties in Graphene and Graphene Nanoribbons

The two-dimensional (2D) graphene with many remarkable physical properties, such as high mechanical robustness, excellent thermal conductivity, extremely high conductance, and giant Seebeck coefficient as well as particular electronic band structures, promises well for potential applications in nanoelectronics, spintronics, photonics, and optoelectronics. The quasi-one-dimensional (1D) graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) and graphene nanojunctions (GNJs), which can be precisely patterned from graphene, are the most elementary building blocks for future nanodevices and nanocircuits. In this chapter, we review the latest advances on graphene, GNRs and GNJs in both theoretical and experimental level, including thermal transport, electronic transport as well as thermoelectric properties. In particular, how to enhance the thermoelectric properties in the 1D graphene-based nanostructures through the geometry-decorated method (antidot lattices, nanopores, edge disorder, defect-engineering, and so on) is presented in detail and some novel results are elucidated clearly. It provides the reader a comprehensive understanding of the recent progress in realistic 1D graphene nanostructures, and will be helpful for designing nanodevices based on graphene in the future.