Revealing the promising near-room-temperature thermoelectric performance in Ag2Se single crystals

With high carrier mobility and intrinsic low lattice thermal conductivity, Ag2Se compounds have attracted increasing attention for thermoelectric application near room temperature. Due to its phase transition at ∼406 K and resulting thermal volume expansion, the growth and thermoelectric properties of large-sized Ag2Se single crystals have seldom been reported so far. In this work, the vertical Bridgeman method was used for growing bulk Ag2Se single crystal, with an orientation preference along low-symmetric (201) plane. The Hall mobility as high as 2 000 cm2/(V·s) and weak electron-phonon coupling contributes to a high electronic quality BE of ∼7.0 in near-room-temperature β-Ag2Se single crystals, which is superior to the high-temperature phase α-Ag2Se. The observed low lattice thermal conductivity of 0.8 W/(m·K) at 300 K is due to the low group speeds and strong anharmonicity. A promising peak zT of 0.66 at 375 K and an average zT of 0.65 at 300–375 K were realized in β-Ag2Se crystals. The low Vickers hardness and good ductile properties were confirmed by experiment and theoretical analysis. This work not only synthesized large-sized and highly-orientated Ag2Se crystals, but also revealed its great potential of thermoelectric performance and mechanical properties for various applications near room temperature.