Thermal physics of the lead chalcogenides PbS, PbSe, and PbTe from first principles

TL;DR

This study uses first-principles calculations to systematically analyze how temperature affects lattice dynamics, thermal conductivity, and electronic structure of lead chalcogenides, providing insights relevant to thermoelectric applications.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive, temperature-dependent computational analysis of PbS, PbSe, and PbTe, including phonon interactions and thermal conductivity, which was lacking in prior fixed-temperature studies.

Findings

Phonon softening linked to Pb off-centering at high temperatures.

Good agreement between calculations and experimental data.

Method demonstrates potential for studying temperature effects in thermoelectric materials.

Abstract

The lead chalcogenides represent an important family of functional materials, in particular due to the benchmark high-temperature thermoelectric performance of PbTe. A number of recent investigations, experimental and theoretical, have aimed to gather insight into their unique lattice dynamics and electronic structure. However, the majority of first-principles modelling has been performed at fixed temperatures, and there has been no comprehensive and systematic computational study of the effect of temperature on the material properties. We report a comparative lattice-dynamics study of the temperature dependence of the properties of PbS, PbSe and PbTe, focussing particularly on those relevant to thermoelectric performance, viz. phonon frequencies, lattice thermal conductivity, and electronic band structure. Calculations are performed within the quasi-harmonic approximation, with the inclusion of phonon-phonon interactions from many-body perturbation theory, which are used to compute phonon lifetimes and predict the lattice thermal conductivity. The results are critically compared against experimental data and other calculations, and add new insight to on-going research on the PbX compounds in relation to the off-centring of Pb at high temperatures, which is shown to be related to phonon softening. The agreement with experiment suggests that this method could serve as a straightforward, powerful and generally-applicable means of investigating the temperature dependence of material properties from first principles.