Bernd Wölfing, Christian Kloc, Jens Teubner, Ernst Bucher. High-Performance Thermoelectric Tl9BiTe6 with an Extremely Low Thermal Conductivity. Physical Review Letters, 86(19), May 2001. [doi]
Tl9BiTe6 exhibits a thermoelectric figure of merit of ZT∼1.2 around 500 K, which significantly exceeds the state-of-the-art materials in this temperature range. The extraordinary thermoelectric performance is mainly due to the extremely low thermal conductivity of Tl9BiTe6 [0.39 W/(ṁK) at 300 K]. In fact, the minimum lifetime of the phonons has to be taken into account to describe the thermal conductivity data.