TY - JOUR
T1 - Ultralow Lattice Thermal Conductivity and Enhanced Thermoelectric Performance in SnTe:Ga Materials
AU - Hwang, Junphil
AU - Fornari, Marco
AU - Al Rahal Al Orabi, Rabih
AU - Lin, Chan Chieh
AU - Gautier, Régis
AU - Fontaine, Bruno
AU - Kim, Woochul
AU - Rhyee, Jong Soo
AU - Wee, Daehyun
N1 - Funding Information:
R.A.R.A.O. and D.W. thank Solvay Special Chemicals for financial support. This work was partially supported by Midcareer Researcher Program (Grant 2011-0028729) and the Nanomaterial Technology Development Program (Grant 2011-0030147) through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST). Computations were performed at the Institut des Sciences Chimiques de Rennes and at the High Performance Computing Center, Michigan State University.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 American Chemical Society.
PY - 2017/1/24
Y1 - 2017/1/24
N2 - Ultralow thermal conductivity is of great interest in a variety of fields, including thermoelectric energy conversion. We report, for the first time, experimental evidence that Ga-doping in SnTe may lower the lattice thermal conduction slightly below the theoretical amorphous minimum at high temperature. Such an effect is justified by the spontaneous formation of nanoprecipitates we characterized as GaTe. Remarkably, the introduction of Ga (2-10%) in SnTe also improves the electronic transport properties by activating several hole pockets in the multivalley valence band. Experimental results are supported by density functional theory calculations. The thermoelectric figure of merit, ZT, reaches ∼1 at 873 K in Sn0.96Ga0.07Te, which corresponds to an ∼80% improvement with respect to pure SnTe.
AB - Ultralow thermal conductivity is of great interest in a variety of fields, including thermoelectric energy conversion. We report, for the first time, experimental evidence that Ga-doping in SnTe may lower the lattice thermal conduction slightly below the theoretical amorphous minimum at high temperature. Such an effect is justified by the spontaneous formation of nanoprecipitates we characterized as GaTe. Remarkably, the introduction of Ga (2-10%) in SnTe also improves the electronic transport properties by activating several hole pockets in the multivalley valence band. Experimental results are supported by density functional theory calculations. The thermoelectric figure of merit, ZT, reaches ∼1 at 873 K in Sn0.96Ga0.07Te, which corresponds to an ∼80% improvement with respect to pure SnTe.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85018193311&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1021/acs.chemmater.6b04076
DO - 10.1021/acs.chemmater.6b04076
M3 - Article
SN - 0897-4756
VL - 29
SP - 612
EP - 620
JO - Chemistry of Materials
JF - Chemistry of Materials
IS - 2
ER -