Effects of colored disorder on the heat conductivity of SiGe alloys from first principles

Semiconducting alloys, in particular SiGe, have been employed for several decades as high- temperature thermoelectric materials. Devising strategies to reduce their thermal conductivity may provide a substantial improvement in their thermoelectric performance also at lower temper- atures. We have carried out an ab initio investigation of the thermal conductivity of SiGe alloys with random and spatially correlated compositional disorder employing the Quasi-Harmonic Green- Kubo (QHGK) theory with force constants computed from density functional theory. Leveraging QHGK and the hydrodynamic extrapolation to achieve size convergence, we obtained a detailed understanding of lattice heat conduction in SiGe and demonstrated that colored disorder suppresses thermal transport across the acoustic vibrational spectrum, leading to up to a 4-fold enhancement in the intrinsic thermoelectric figure of merit.

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