Lattice Thermal Conductivity of the Binary and Ternary Group-IV Alloys Si-Sn, Ge-Sn, and Si-Ge-Sn

Efficient thermoelectric (TE) energy conversion requires materials with low thermal conductivity and good electronic properties. Si-Ge alloys, and their nanostructures such as thin films and nanowires, have been extensively studied for TE applications; other group-IV alloys, including those containing Sn, have not been given as much attention as TEs, despite their increasing applications in other areas including optoelectronics. We study the lattice thermal conductivity of binary (Si-Sn and Ge-Sn) and ternary (Si-Ge-Sn) alloys and their thin films in the Boltzmann transport formalisms, including a full phonon dispersion and momentum-dependent boundary-roughness scattering. We show that Si-Sn alloys have the lowest conductivity (3 W/mK) of all the bulk alloys, more than 2 times lower than Si-Ge, attributed to the larger difference in mass between the two constituents. In addition, we demonstrate that thin films offer an additional reduction in thermal conductivity, reaching around 1 W/mK in 20-nm-thick Si-Sn, Ge-Sn, and ternary Si-Ge-Sn films, which is near the conductivity of amorphous SiO2. We conclude that group-IV alloys containing Sn have the potential for high-efficiency TE energy conversion.