Cubic ReSTe as a High-Performance Thermoelectric Material

TL;DR

This paper investigates the thermoelectric properties of cubic ReSTe-based materials, demonstrating notable ZT values and suggesting potential for high-performance n-type thermoelectrics due to electronic band structure features.

Contribution

It reports the thermoelectric performance of cubic ReSTe and doped variants, highlighting their high ZT and potential for improved n-type thermoelectric efficiency.

Findings

ReSTe and W-doped ReSTe achieve ZT of 0.4 at 660 K.

All samples exhibit p-type thermoelectric behavior.

Electronic band structure suggests higher performance for n-type ReSTe.

Abstract

We report thermoelectric properties of sintered samples of undoped, W-doped, and Sb-doped ReSTe crystallized in a cubic MoSBr-type structure. All samples exhibited p-type thermoelectric properties. ReSTe and Re0.993W0.007STe exhibited the largest dimensionless figure of merit ZT, reaching 0.4 at 660 K. This high performance is attributed to large power factor owing to the degenerate semiconducting state realized by the strong spin-orbit coupling and low lattice thermal conductivity of the sintered samples. Furthermore, electronic band dispersion of ReSTe is almost flat at the bottom of the conduction band, suggesting that n-type ReSTe is expected to exhibit much higher performance than p-type ReSTe.