Tellurium as a high-performance elemental thermoelectric

Siqi Lin, Wen Li (), Zhiwei Chen, Jiawen Shen, Binghui Ge and Yanzhong Pei ()
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Siqi Lin: Key Laboratory of Advanced Civil Engineering Materials of Ministry of Education, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University
Wen Li: Key Laboratory of Advanced Civil Engineering Materials of Ministry of Education, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University
Zhiwei Chen: Key Laboratory of Advanced Civil Engineering Materials of Ministry of Education, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University
Jiawen Shen: Key Laboratory of Advanced Civil Engineering Materials of Ministry of Education, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University
Binghui Ge: Beijing national laboratory for condensed matter physics, Institute of physics, Chinese academy of science
Yanzhong Pei: Key Laboratory of Advanced Civil Engineering Materials of Ministry of Education, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University

Nature Communications, 2016, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-6

Abstract: Abstract High-efficiency thermoelectric materials require a high conductivity. It is known that a large number of degenerate band valleys offers many conducting channels for improving the conductivity without detrimental effects on the other properties explicitly, and therefore, increases thermoelectric performance. In addition to the strategy of converging different bands, many semiconductors provide an inherent band nestification, equally enabling a large number of effective band valley degeneracy. Here we show as an example that a simple elemental semiconductor, tellurium, exhibits a high thermoelectric figure of merit of unity, not only demonstrating the concept but also filling up the high performance gap from 300 to 700 K for elemental thermoelectrics. The concept used here should be applicable in general for thermoelectrics with similar band features.

Date: 2016
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DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10287

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