Effect of Te substitution on crystal structure and transport properties of AgBiSe₂ thermoelectric material

Silver bismuth diselenide (AgBiSe₂) has attracted much attention as an efficient thermoelectric material, owing to its intrinsically low lattice thermal conductivity. While samples synthesized using a solid-state reaction showed n-type conductivity and their dimensionless figure of merit (ZT) reached ∼1 by electron doping, theoretical calculations predicted that a remarkably high thermoelectric performance can be achieved in p-type AgBiSe₂. In this paper, we present the effect of Te substitution on the crystal structure and thermoelectric properties of AgBiSe₂, expecting p-type conductivity due to the shallowing of the energy potential of the valence band. We found that all AgBiSe_2-xTe_x (x = 0-0.8) prepared using a solid-state reaction exhibits n-type conductivity from 300 to 750 K. The room-temperature lattice thermal conductivity decreased to as low as 0.3 W m^-1 K^-1 by Te substitution, which was qualitatively described using the point defect scattering model for the solid solution. We show that ZT reaches ∼0.6 for x = 0.8 at a broad range of temperatures, from 550 to 750 K, due to the increased power factor, although the carrier concentration has not been optimized yet.