Bi2Te3-based materials have been reported to be one of the best room-temperature thermoelectric materials, and it is a challenge to substantially improve their thermoelectric properties. Here novel Bi2Te3 core fibers with borosilicate glass cladding were fabricated utilizing a modified molten core drawing method. The Bi2Te3 core of the fiber was found to consist of hexagonal polycrystalline nanosheets, and polycrystalline nanosheets had a preferential orientation; in other words, the hexagonal Bi2Te3 lamellar cleavage more tended to be parallel to the symmetry axis of the fibers. Compared with a homemade 3-mm-diameter Bi2Te3 rod, the polycrystalline nanosheets’ preferential orientation in the 89-μm-diameter Bi2Te3 core increased its electrical conductivity, but deduced its Seebeck coefficient. The Bi2Te3 core exhibits an ultrahigh ZT of 0.73 at 300 K, which is 232% higher than that of the Bi2Te3 rod. The demonstration of fibers with oriented nano-polycrystalline core and the integration with an efficient fabrication technique will pave the way for the fabrication of high-performance thermoelectric fibers.
Organic microlasers have attracted much attention due to their unique features such as high mechanical flexibility, facile doping of gain materials, high optical quality, simplicity and low‐cost fabrication. However, organic gain materials usually suffer from aggregation‐caused quenching (ACQ), preventing further advances of organic microlasers. Here, a new type of microlaser from aggregation‐induced emission (AIE) material is successfully demonstrated. By introducing a typical noncrystalline AIE material, a high quality microlaser is obtained via a surface tension‐induced self‐assembly approach. Distinct from conventional organic microlasers, the organic luminescent material used here is initially nonluminescent but can shine after aggregation under optical pumping. Further investigations demonstrate that AIE‐based microlasers exhibit advantages to enable much higher doping concentrations, which provides an alternative way to improved lasing performance including dramatically reduced threshold and favorable lasing stability. It is believed that these results could provide a promising way to extend the content of microlasers and open a new avenue to enable applications ranging from chemical sensing to biology.
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