Deng Tingting, Gao Zhiqiang, Li Ze, Qiu Pengfei, Li Zhi, Yuan Xinjie, Ming Chen, Wei Tian-Ran, Chen Lidong, Shi Xun
State Key Laboratory of High Performance Ceramics and Superfine Microstructure, Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China.
School of Chemistry and Materials Science, Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou, China.
Science. 2024 Dec 6;386(6726):1112-1117. doi: 10.1126/science.adr8450. Epub 2024 Dec 5.
The recently discovered metal-like room-temperature plasticity in inorganic semiconductors reshapes our knowledge of the physical properties of materials, giving birth to a series of new-concept functional materials. However, current room-temperature plastic inorganic semiconductors are still very rare, and their performance is inferior to that of classic brittle semiconductors. Taking classic bismuth telluride (BiTe)-based thermoelectric semiconductors as an example, we show that antisite defects can lead to high-density, diverse microstructures that substantially affect mechanical properties and thus successfully transform these bulk semiconductors from brittle to plastic, leading to a high figure of merit of up to 1.05 at 300 kelvin compared with other plastic semiconductors, similar to the best brittle semiconductors. We provide an effective strategy to plastify brittle semiconductors to display good plasticity and excellent functionality simultaneously.
最近在无机半导体中发现的类似金属的室温可塑性重塑了我们对材料物理性质的认识，催生了一系列新概念功能材料。然而，目前的室温塑性无机半导体仍然非常罕见，其性能也不如经典的脆性半导体。以经典的碲化铋（BiTe）基热电半导体为例，我们表明反位缺陷可导致高密度、多样的微观结构，从而显著影响机械性能，进而成功地将这些块状半导体从脆性转变为塑性，在300开尔文时与其他塑性半导体相比，优值高达1.05，与最佳脆性半导体相当。我们提供了一种有效的策略来使脆性半导体塑化，从而同时展现出良好的可塑性和优异的功能性。
