Self-compensation induced vacancies for significant phonon scattering in InSb

Jun Mao, Jennifer L. Niedziela, Yumei Wang, Yi Xia, Binghui Ge, Zihang Liu, Jiawei Zhou, Zhensong Ren, Weishu Liu, Maria K.Y. Chan, Gang Chen, Olivier Delaire, Qian Zhang, Zhifeng Ren

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

30 Scopus citations

Abstract

Phonon scattering by point defects via mass differences and strain fluctuations could effectively reduce the lattice thermal conductivity. The atomic mass difference can be maximized by introducing the vacancies thus leading to a significant phonon scattering. Usually, the vacancies are introduced by tuning the stoichiometry or forming solid solution with certain compound that contains intrinsically high concentration of vacancies. In this work, we demonstrate that vacancies can be effectively induced by the self-compensation effect via chemical doping. Indium (In) vacancies in InSb were induced by Te-doping and a substantial reduction in thermal conductivity was observed. Room temperature lattice thermal conductivity of the melted and then hot-pressed InSb (without In vacancies) is ~ 14.5 W m−1 K−1 but only ~ 3.8 W m−1 K−1 for InSb0.96Te0.04 (with In vacancies), a reduction of ~ 74%. The advantage of using this strategy for phonon engineering lies in the fact that a substantial reduction in thermal conductivity can be achieved even when the dopant concentration is rather low. Since the self-compensation effect is widely observed in different compounds, it indicates that the vacancy engineering strategy used here is also applicable to a variety of other materials to effectively reduce the lattice thermal conductivity.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)189-196
Number of pages8
JournalNano Energy
Volume48
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2018

Funding

The work was supported by the Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center (S 3 TEC), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy , Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under Award Number DE-SC0001299 . The work performed at Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) was funded by the Nature Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11674078 ), and Shenzhen fundamental research projects (Grant No. JCYJ20160427184825558 ). This work was also partly supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division. The Research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Spallation Neutron Source was sponsored by the Scientific User Facilities Division, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, US DOE. Y. M. Wang acknowledges the support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11474329 and 11104327 ). This work was performed, in part, at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility, and supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357 .

Keywords

  • InSb
  • Phonon engineering
  • Point-defect scattering
  • Self-compensation effect
  • Thermal conductivity
  • Vacancy

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