Tellurium as a high-performance elemental thermoelectric.
Tellurium as a high-performance elemental thermoelectric.
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碲作为高性能热电元素
DOI：
10.1038/ncomms10287
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发表时间：
2016-01-11
影响因子：
16.6
通讯作者：
Pei Y
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Lin S;Li W;Chen Z;Shen J;Ge B;Pei Y
高效热电材料需要高电导率。众所周知，大量的简并带谷提供了许多导电通道，用于改善电导率，而不会对其他性能产生明显的不利影响，因此，提高了热电性能。除了会聚不同能带的策略之外，许多半导体还提供了固有的能带嵌套，同样能够实现大量的有效带谷简并。在这里，我们显示作为一个例子，一个简单的元素半导体，碲，表现出高的热电优值的单位，不仅展示了概念，但也填补了高性能的差距，从300至700 K的元素热电。这里所用的概念一般适用于具有类似能带特征的热电器件。
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.