Influence of stress on the power factor of antimony telluride

We investigated the behavior of transport properties of antimony telluride under hydrostatic pressure and uniaxial stress up to 4 GPa. All our calculations were done within first-principles using the linearized-augmented plane-wave method. First, we calculated the transport distribution for several stress conditions. Next, using these stress dependent transport distributions, we derived the stress dependence of the electrical conductivity, the Seebeck coefficient, and the power factor. Our results are in qualitative agreement with experiment. Furthermore, we found that hydrostatic pressure does not improve the power factor, while, on the other hand, a large increase under uniaxial stress can he observed.