Connecting thermoelectric performance and topological insulator behavior: Bi2Te3 and Bi2Te2Se from first principles

Thermoelectric performance is of interest for numerous applications such as waste-heat recovery and solid-state energy conversion and will be seen to be closely connected to topological-insulator behavior. In this context, we here report first-principles transport and defect calculations for Bi2Te2Se in relation to Bi2Te3. The two compounds are found to contain remarkably different electronic structures in spite of being isostructural and isoelectronic. We discuss these results in terms of the topological-insulator characteristics of these compounds.