Local structure of the high-temperature thermoelectric material PbTe using the maximum entropy method (MEM) and pair distribution function (PDF) Original Research Article

The electron density distribution and the local structure of the high temperature thermoelectric material PbTe has been studied. Powder X-ray data set of PbTe is analyzed in terms of cell parameter, thermal vibration parameters, 1D, 2D and 3-dimensional electron density distributions. The bonding between the atoms using the maximum entropy method (MEM) and bond-length distribution using pair distribution function (PDF) have been analyzed. Both the pictorial and the numerical results of electron density and PDF studies show mixed ionic and covalent characters in PbTe.