High Figure of Merit in Gallium-Doped Nanostructured n-Type PbTe-xGeTe with Midgap States

Luo, Zhong-Zhen; Cai, Songting; Hao, Shiqiang; Bailey, Trevor P.; Su, Xianli; Spanopoulos, Ioannis; Hadar, Ido; Tan, Gangjian; Luo, Yubo; Xu, Jianwei; Uher, Ctirad; Wolverton, Christopher; Dravid, Vinayak P.; Yan, Qingyu; Kanatzidis, Mercouri G.

doi:10.1021/jacs.9b09249

Title: High Figure of Merit in Gallium-Doped Nanostructured n-Type PbTe-xGeTe with Midgap States

Journal Article · Wed Sep 11 00:00:00 EDT 2019 · Journal of the American Chemical Society

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.9b09249· OSTI ID:1776870

^[1]; Cai, Songting ^[2];

^[2]; Bailey, Trevor P. ^[3];

^[4];

^[2];

^[2]; Tan, Gangjian ^[4]; Luo, Yubo ^[1];

^[5]; Uher, Ctirad ^[3];

^[2];

^[6];

^[2]

Nanyang Technological Univ. (Singapore); Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (United States)
Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (United States)
Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (United States)
Wuhan Univ. of Technology, Wuhan (China)
Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Innovis (Singapore). Institute of Materials Research and Engineering
Nanyang Technological Univ. (Singapore)

PbTe-based thermoelectric materials are some of the most promising for converting heat into electricity, but their ntype versions still lag in performance the p-type ones. Here, we introduce midgap states and nanoscale precipitates using Gadoping and GeTe-alloying to considerably improve the performance of n-type PbTe. The GeTe alloying significantly enlarges the energy band gap of PbTe and subsequent Ga doping introduces special midgap states that lead to an increased density of states (DOS) effective mass and enhanced Seebeck coefficients. Moreover, the nucleated Ga₂Te₃ nanoscale precipitates and off-center discordant Ge atoms in the PbTe matrix cause intense phonon scattering, strongly reducing the thermal conductivity (~0.65 W m^-1 K^-1 at 623 K). As a result, a high room-temperature thermoelectric figure of merit ZT ~ 0.59 and a peak ZT_max of ~1.47 at 673 K were obtained for the Pb_0.98Ga_0.02Te-5%GeTe. The ZT_avg value that is most relevant for devices is ~1.27 from 400 to 773 K, the highest recorded value for n-type PbTe.

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Research Organization:: Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES); National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)

Grant/Contract Number:: SC0014520; AC02-06CH11357; AC02-05CH11231; 2018-T2-1-010

OSTI ID:: 1776870

Journal Information:: Journal of the American Chemical Society, Vol. 141, Issue 40; ISSN 0002-7863

Publisher:: American Chemical Society (ACS)Copyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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