Behavior of the thermopower in amorphous materials at the metal-insulator transition

Abstract

We study the thermal transport properties in three-dimensional disordered systems close to the metal-insulator transition within linear response. Using a suitable form for the energy-dependent conductivity $\sigma$, we show that the value of the dynamical scaling exponent for noninteracting disordered systems such as the Anderson model of localization can be reproduced. Furthermore, the values of the thermopower S have the right order of magnitude close to the transition as compared to the experimental results. A sign change in the thermoelectric power S - as is often observed in experiments - can also be modeled within the linear response formulation using modified experimental $\sigma$ data as input.