Strain engineering of polar optical phonon scattering mechanism - an effective way to optimize the power-factor and lattice thermal conductivity of ScN.

The tug-of-war between the thermoelectric power factor and the figure-of-merit complicates thermoelectric material selection, particularly for mid-to-high temperature thermoelectric materials. Approaches to reduce lattice thermal conductivity while maintaining a high-power factor are crucial in thermoelectric applications. Using strain engineering, we comprehensively investigated the microscopic mechanisms influencing the lattice thermal conductivity in this study.