Ag2Te simultaneously shows high mobility and low thermal conductivity, however the relatively low band gap of ∼0.2 eV prevents it from achieving high thermoelectric figure of merit, zT, in the high temperature phase. In this study, the band gap of Ag2Te has been increased enabling a zT of unity by forming alloys and composites with PbTe, thereby demonstrating the importance of exploiting potentially good thermoelectrics among these small band gap semiconductors and similar materials.
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Pei et al. (2011) studied this question.