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Abstract

Highly conductive topological semimetals with exotic electronic structures offer fertile ground for the investigation of the electrical and thermal transport behavior of quasiparticles. Here, we find that the layer-structured Dirac semimetal PtSn₄ exhibits a largely suppressed thermal conductivity under a magnetic field. At low temperatures, a dramatic decrease in the thermal conductivity of PtSn₄ by more than two orders of magnitude is obtained at 9 T. Moreover, PtSn₄ shows both strong longitudinal and transverse thermoelectric responses under a magnetic field. Large power factor and Nernst power factor of approximately 80–100 μW·cm<sup>-1</sub>·K^-2 are obtained around 15 K in various magnetic fields. As a result, the thermoelectric figure of merit is strongly enhanced by more than 30 times, compared to that without a magnetic field. This work provides a paradigm for the decoupling of the electron and hole transport behavior of highly conductive topological semimetals and is helpful for developing topological semimetals for thermoelectric energy conversion.