Regulation of electrical properties via ferroelectric polarization for high performance Sb2Te3 thermoelectric thin films

Sb2Te3 based thermoelectric thin films play a crucial role in energy conversion, whose thermoelectric performance highly depends on electrical properties. Herein, we proposed a new electrical properties regulation approach by ferroelectric polarization, which extracted polarization charges and achieved an in-situ modulation of the carrier concentration in Sb2Te3 thermoelectric thin films. In the positively polarized (Pr+) state, the power factor (PF) of Sb2Te3 thin films reached 14.16 mu W cm-1 K-2, 19.0 % higher than the unpolarized one. The corresponding Sb2Te3 thin film thermoelectric generator (TEG) demonstrated a high output power density (wout) of 2.22 mW cm-2 in the Pr+ state at Delta T = 42 K, demonstrating the promising potential for low-grade heat harvesting.