ИСТИНА

As it was recently established, effective and compact thermoelectric converters for solving energy saving and energy efficiency problems can be made on the basis of semiconductor nanostructures, among which thin layers of silicon nanowires (SiNWs) obtained by metal-assisted chemical etching (MACE) are especially promising. Despite a significant amount of work, the influence of porosity, the level of doping and the crystallographic orientation of nanowires on their thermoelectric characteristics are still completely unclear. Since the technique of MACE is inexpensive, flexible and scalable, it can be used to produce SiNWs with given thermoelectric characteristics over large areas and various surface geometries, including flexible media (for example, metal tapes) that can be of great practical use in the development of thermoelectric converters of a new generation that are easily adaptable to various tasks of increasing energy efficiency. According to the Nyquist diagram, it can be said that the impedance of this system decreases with temperature. The chemical etching leads to a formation of additional “resistor-capacitor” part in equivalent circuit that represents the contribution of SiNWs. In this report the nature of structural changes, thermoelectric and electron transport properties of SiNWs was studied depending on the conditions of MACE. This work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (Grant № 17-12-01386).