Lattice Strain Advances Thermoelectrics

By Yixuan Wu, Zhiwei Chen, P. Nan, F. Xiong, Siqi Lin, Xinyue Zhang, Yue Chen, Lidong Chen, B. Ge, Y. Pei. Joule, 2019

476 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Lattice vibrations in crystalline materials generate phonons as heat carriers for heat conduction, and the phonon dispersion (energy versus momentum) is fundamentally determined by the mass of lattice vibrators (atoms) and the interaction force between atoms. A significant manipulation of lattice thermal conductivity through a change in atomic mass usually requires a large variation in chemical composition, which is not always valid thermodynamically or may risk the resultant detriment of other functionalities (e.g., carrier mobility). Here we show a strategy of alternatively manipulating the interaction force between atoms through lattice strains without changing the composition, for remarkably reducing the lattice thermal conductivity without reducing carrier mobility, in Na0.03Eu0.03Sn0.02Pb0.92Te with stable lattice dislocations. This successfully leads to an extraordinarily high thermoelectric figure of merit, with the help of valence band convergence. This work offers both insights and solutions on lattice strain engineering for reducing lattice thermal conductivity, thus advancing thermoelectrics.

Subfields: Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d3dc91ee96c869e02a0f9fb755aa8800c5b7bdf5

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In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

1. Ting Zhu
2. C. Fu
3. Claudia Felser
4. Stuart S. P. Parkin

In Materials Chemistry

1. C. Fu
2. Ting Zhu
3. Claudia Felser
4. Lidong Chen
5. Ju Li
6. Stuart S. P. Parkin
7. Xinbing Zhao
8. Jin Zou

Citations in the corpus

• Strong phonon softening and avoided crossing in aliovalence-doped heavy-band thermoelectrics (2023, methodology): “…classical Debye–Callaway model is derived using the perturbation theory with an assumption that the phonon dispersion in the crystal is unchanged 39–41 , and the additional extrinsic scattering mechanisms, such as point defects, grain boundaries, dislocations and so on, are considered to only…”