LAUSR

Abstract Copper and silver chalcogenides with superionic conduction behavior have shown impressively high ZT values, but there has been no intensive effort to optimize their carrier density to further improve their ZT values. Here, we prepared polycrystalline CuxAg2−xSe0.5Te0.5 (x = 0.01, 0.05, 0.1) samples using high temperature melting followed by hot-press sintering, and characterized their thermoelectric properties. We demonstrated that Cu substitution for Ag was achieved with 0.7 over a wide temperature range of 460–560 K for x > 0.05. We suggest that the unusual Cu doping effect in Ag2Se0.5Te0.5 can be attributed to the creation of Cu ion conduction in addition to Ag ion conduction, and the optimization of the compound's n-type carrier density.