Enhancement of thermoelectric figure-of-merit by resonant states of aluminium doping in lead selenide

• DOI: 10.1039/c1ee02465e
• Publication Date: 2011-11-11T13:30:46Z
• Authors: Qinyong Zhang; Hui Wang; Weishu Liu; Hengzhi Wang; Bo Yu; Qian Zhang; Zhiting Tian; George Ni; Sangyeop Lee; Keivan Esfarjani; Gang Chen; Zhifeng Ren
• Keywords: 02 engineering and technology; 0210 nano-technology; 7. Clean energy

By adding aluminium (Al) into lead selenide (PbSe), we successfully prepared n-type PbSe thermoelectric materials with a figure-of-merit (ZT) of 1.3 at 850 K. Such a high ZT is achieved by a combination of high Seebeck coefficient caused by very possibly the resonant states in the conduction band created by Al dopant and low thermal conductivity from nanosized phonon scattering centers.