Crystal structure and electrical transport properties of thermoelectric chalcogenide compounds

Abstract

In this work, our main aim was to understand the role played by different dopants on the crystal structure and electrical transport properties of poly crystalline SnSe. It has been found experimentally, that small percentage (up to 5%) of doping cations like Cu, Ag, In, Ge, Ni, etc at Sn site im proves the overall collective thermoelectric performance of SnSe. However, the exact mechanism for improvement of each individual property is not well understood. So in this work, we tried to understand the mechanism by making pure and doped SnSe samples and study their structure by different characterization techniques. We also tried to calculate the electronic struc ture of the prepared samples where we successfully calculated the density of states of undoped sample. Some open questions have been discussed at the end.