Synthesis, Structure, and Thermoelectric Properties of α-Zn<sub>3</sub>Sb<sub>2</sub> and Comparison to β-Zn<sub>13</sub>Sb<sub>10</sub>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Zn–Sb compounds (e.g., ZnSb, β-Zn 13 Sb 10 ) are known to have intriguing thermoelectric properties, but studies of the Zn 3 Sb 2 composition are largely absent. In this work, α- Zn 3 Sb 2 was synthesized and studied via temperature-dependent synchrotron powder diffraction. The α- Zn 3 Sb 2 phase undergoes a phase transformation to the β form at 425 °C, which is stable until melting at 590 °C. Rapid quenching was successful in stabilizing the α phase at room temperature, although all attempts to quench β-Zn 3 Sb 2 were unsuccessful. The structure of α-Zn 3 Sb 2 was solved using single crystal diffraction techniques and verified through Rietveld refinement of the powder data. α-Zn 3 Sb 2 adopts a large hexagonal cell ( R 3̅ space group, a = 15.212(2), c = 74.83(2) Å) containing a well-defined framework of isolated Sb 3– anions but highly disordered Zn 2+ cations. Dense ingots of both the α-Zn 3 Sb 2 and β-Zn 13 Sb 10 phases were formed and used to characterize and compare the low temperature thermoelectric properties. Resistivity and Seebeck coefficient measurements on α-Zn 3 Sb 2 are consistent with a small-gap, degenerately doped, p -type semiconductor. The temperature-dependent lattice thermal conductivity of α-Zn 3 Sb 2 is unusual, resembling that of an amorphous material. Consistent with the extreme degree of Zn disorder observed in the structural analysis, phonon scattering in α-Zn 3 Sb 2 appears to be completely dominated by point-defect scattering over all temperatures below 350 K. This contrasts with the typical balance between point-defect scattering and Umklapp scattering seen in β-Zn 13 Sb 10 . Using the Debye–Callaway interpretation of the lattice thermal conductivity, we use the differences between α-Zn 3 Sb 2 and β-Zn 13 Sb 10 to illustrate the potential significance of cation/anion disorder in the Zn–Sb system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".