In this study, the as-cast n-type B

In this study, the as-cast n-type Bi2Te2.4Se0.6 samples were directlyfabricated with the direction solidification at a large temperature-gradient (~200 K/cm) (LTDS). By liquid state manipulation (LSM), a highZT is achieved with LTDS at a growth rate of 5 µm/s, i.e., with the peakZT = 1.22 at 477 K, the average ZT between 300 and 575 K reaches1.09, being higher than that of other advanced technologies reported sofar [13,20,21,36,50,51]. The results are due to the significantly improved PF and relatively low κl. The obtained ultrahigh PF can be understood as following two aspects: a) strong texturing structures formedby direction solidification boost the σ; b) with proper structure texturing, LSM obviously raises the S due to the increased effective mass,with almost unaltered σ. The low κl is a result of nanoscale distortedregions, dislocations and atomic-scale lattice distortions, which can beobviously observed in the LSM-LTDS5. It should be noted that, thecombination of liquid state manipulation and direction solidificationhas been applied in TE materials for the first time. No doubt, our newstrategy is a typical methodological innovation for TE materials fabrication. The present results strongly demonstrate the efficacy of LSM in an-type Bi2(TeSe)3 sample with proper structure texturing and paves theway for an effective strategy in large-scale production of high performance anisotropic TE materials.