Thermoelectric Material Discovery Sets Stage for New Forms of Electric Power in the Future

Thermoelectrics directly convert heat into electricity and power a wide array of items — from NASA’s Perseverance rover currently exploring Mars to travel coolers that chill beverages. A Clemson University physicist has joined forces with collaborators from China and Denmark to create a new and potentially paradigm-shifting high-performance thermoelectric compound. A material’s atomic structure, which is how atoms arrange themselves in space and time, determines its properties. Typically, solids are crystalline or amorphous. In crystals, atoms are in an orderly and symmetrical pattern. Amorphous materials have randomly distributed atoms. Clemson researcher Jian He and the international team created a new hybrid compound in which the crystalline and amorphous sublattices are intertwined into a one-of-a-kind crystal-amorphic duality.