**1. Introduction**

Bismuth chalcogenide thin films are of great interest because of the exciting properties of topological insulators (TIs) and their applications to thermoelectrics (TEs). These materials have been applied in integrated TE cooling devices working at near room temperature [1, 2]. TIs are exotic materials with an insulating bulk and topologically protected states on the surface which could be used in different applications, such as spintronics and quantum computing [3–6]. The topological surface states (TSSs) exhibit Dirac linear energy dispersion

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

inside the bulk gap, spin-polarization by spin-momentum locking nature, and weak antilocalization (WAL) due to the strong spin-orbit coupling [3–6]. Thus, the WAL through magnetotransport studies has been widely used as a signature of TI materials [7–9].

For application purposes, thin film growth techniques for TE and TI materials are required. Among physical vapor deposition techniques, pulsed laser deposition (PLD) offers great versatility in growing polycrystalline and epitaxial thin films with high growth rates, multiple elements, and diverse structural morphologies for both fundamental studies and applications. The purpose of this chapter is to outline recent advances in the PLD growths of bismuth chalcogenide thin films with desired properties for TE/TI applications and fundamental studies.
