title: Tellurium as a high-performance elemental thermoelectric.
abstract: High-efficiency thermoelectric materials require a high conductivity. It is known that a large number of degenerate band valleys offers many conducting channels for improving the conductivity without detrimental effects on the other properties explicitly, and therefore, increases thermoelectric performance. In addition to the strategy of converging different bands, many semiconductors provide an inherent band nestification, equally enabling a large number of effective band valley degeneracy. Here we show as an example that a simple elemental semiconductor, tellurium, exhibits a high thermoelectric figure of merit of unity, not only demonstrating the concept but also filling up the high performance gap from 300 to 700 K for elemental thermoelectrics. The concept used here should be applicable in general for thermoelectrics with similar band features.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Advanced Civil Engineering Materials of Ministry of Education, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University, 4800 Caoan Road, Shanghai 201804, China.
authors.forename: Siqi
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Advanced Civil Engineering Materials of Ministry of Education, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University, 4800 Caoan Road, Shanghai 201804, China.
authors.forename: Wen
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Advanced Civil Engineering Materials of Ministry of Education, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University, 4800 Caoan Road, Shanghai 201804, China.
authors.forename: Zhiwei
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Advanced Civil Engineering Materials of Ministry of Education, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University, 4800 Caoan Road, Shanghai 201804, China.
authors.forename: Jiawen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Shen
authors.affiliation: Beijing national laboratory for condensed matter physics, Institute of physics, Chinese academy of science, Beijing 100190, China.
authors.forename: Binghui
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Ge
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Advanced Civil Engineering Materials of Ministry of Education, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tongji University, 4800 Caoan Road, Shanghai 201804, China.
authors.forename: Yanzhong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Pei