Influence of strain on anisotropic thermoelectric transport in Bi2Te3and Sb2Te

N. F. Hinsche

¹

,

B. Yu. Yavorsky

²

,

Ingrid Mertig

³

et al.

Abstract

On the basis of detailed first-principles calculations and semi-classical Boltzmann transport, the anisotropic thermoelectric transport properties of Bi2Te3 and Sb2Te3 under strain were investigated. It was found that due to compensation effects of the strain dependent thermopower and electrical conductivity, the related powerfactor will decrease under applied in-plane strain for Bi2Te3, while being stable for Sb2Te3. A clear preference for thermoelectric transport under hole-doping, as well as for the in-plane transport direction was found for both tellurides. In contrast to the electrical conductivity anisotropy, the anisotropy of the thermopower was almost robust under applied strain. The assumption of an anisotropic relaxation time for Bi2Te3 suggests, that already in the single crystalline system strong anisotropic scattering effects should play a role.

Engineering the Near-Edge Electronic Structure of SnSe through Strains

“…Another important alternative is strain-engineering, which has long been used as an effective and predictable means for tuning the materials properties [11][12][13][14][15][16], including strain-induced structural phase transitions [17][18][19], indirect-direct band gap transition [11][12][13], and semiconductormetal transition [12,20]. Previous work [4,21,22] also demonstrated the possibility of applying strains to tune the thermoelectric power factor. The band edges of SnSe have several competing local extrema within a small energy window, and the wave functions of the electronic states near these local extrema have different atomic origins.…”

Structural phase transitions in Bi2Se3 under high pressure

“…Besides the importance of theoretical investigation in condensed matter physics, TIs also have various actual applications in the fields of spintronics12, quantum computation34 and thermoelectric energy conversion56. As excellent thermoelectric materials, Bi 2 Se 3 , Bi 2 Te 3 , and Sb 2 Te 3 were extensively studied in the 1950s and 1960s.…”

Design and Preparation of High-Performance Bulk Thermoelectric Materials with Defect Structures

“…Therefore, there are many reports on the electronic structures of Bi 2 Te 3 , and the results of transport properties simulations have been reported since the early 2000's. [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] The crystal structure of Bi 2 Te 3 is shown in Fig. 1, and the space group of the crystal structure is R m.…”