Fig. 5: Comparison of electrical conductivity σ, paracrystallinity g, and lattice thermal conductivity κ_latt of different types of materials at room temperature.

a Comparison of the dependence of σ on g in Cu-BHT and various conducting polymers from the literature. Cu-BHT (the light yellow shaded region) exhibits significantly higher electrical conductivity at a given paracrystallinity value than conducting polymers (Data for doped polymer semiconductors are extracted from reference⁷⁸. b Plot of σ vs κ_latt. These materials include organic materials, inorganic materials, commercial Bi₂Te₃ alloy, cage-like compounds such as skutterudites, open frameworks such as porous MOFs, and non-open, non-porous Cu-BHT (this work and previous work). The values for our Cu-BHT, indicated by stars in the light yellow shaded region, highlight the advantageous defect-tolerant charge and defect-sensitive phonon transport regime discovered in this work that provides an electrical conductivity/lattice thermal conductivity ratio σ/κ_latt of up to 60 × 10⁴ S K W⁻¹ that is 5–16 times higher than that of other state-of-the-art thermoelectric materials. The figure does not include materials in which thermoelectric enhancement is attributed to using special techniques such as nanostructuring or alignment. Detailed data from the relevant references^{4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,19,79,80} are provided in Supplementary Table 3.