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An innovative concept of twin-enhanced thermoelectricity was proposed to fundamentally resolve the high electrical resistance while not degrading the phonon scattering of the thermoelectric nanoassemblies. Under this frame, a variety of highly oriented and twinned bismuth antimony telluride (BixSb2-xTe3) nanocrystals were successfully fabricated by a large-area pulsed-laser deposition (PLD) technique on insulated silicon substrates at various deposition temperatures. The significant presence of the nonbasal- and basal-plane twins across the hexagonal BiSbTe nanocrystals, which were experimentally and systematically observed for the first time, evidently contributes to the unusually high electrical conductivity of ~2700 S cm(-1) and the power factor of ~25 μW cm(-1) K(-2) as well as the relatively low thermal conductivity of ~1.1 W m(-1) K(-1) found in these nanostructured films.

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We describe a facile and one-step pulsed laser deposition (PLD) technique that was first time utilized to systematically fabricate a series of innovative Bi2Te3 superassembly-on-epitaxy bi-layer nanostructures uniquely coupling upper self-assembled well-ordered Bi2Te3 hierarchical nanostructures with unusually high surface-and interface-to-volume ratios and a highly electrical conductive epitaxial bottom thin layer on insulated SiO2/Si substrates as an emerging new class of the most advanced thermoelectric nanomaterials. The optimized power factor of the present superassembly-on-epitaxy films is one to three orders of magnitude higher than that of most Bi2Te3 nanoassemblies defined as assemblies of nanocrystals, evidently proving the significance and potential of the present new concept and resulting thermoelectric nanomaterials.