High thermoelectric performance of n-type PbTe 1-y S y due to deep lying states induced by indium doping and spinodal decomposition

Good thermoelectric materials should have high engineering figure-of-merit (ZT)eng, not peak ZT, to achieve high conversion efficiency. In this work, we achieved a good (ZT)eng by optimizing the carrier concentration to improve the room temperature ZT using deep lying dopant, indium, in PbTe 1-y S y. It was found that a room temperature ZT as high as ~0.5 and a peak ZT ~1.1 at about 673 K were obtained in Pb0.98In0.02Te0.8S0.2 due to a lower thermal conductivity by alloy scattering and Spinodal decomposition. The calculated efficiency could be as high as ~12% at cold side 323 K and hot side 773 K. The approach is expected to work in other materials systems too.