Nonequilibrium Phonon Distributions in Metals

Abstract

The effect of a nonequilibrium phonon distribution on some of the transport properties of metals is calculated in the presence of electric and thermal currents and a magnetic field. It is shown that the lattice heat current contains an additional term not found in the literature which is equal in magnitude to the terms usually retained, and that this term represents the contribution from the nonequilibrium part of the electron energy distribution. Thus, the heat current carried by the lattice in metals is dependent on the magnitude of the electron current. Further, the effect of electron phonon scattering caused by a nonequilibrium phonon distribution on the Ettingshausen and Ettingshausen-Nernst coefficients is shown to be insufficient to explain the anomalous behavior of these coefficients for metals.