RQMP Research Seminar

Predictive theoretical modeling of electro-thermal transport

Jesse Maassen

Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science
Dalhousie University

A major challenge facing the world today involves exploiting clean, abundant energy sources, and reducing our overall consumption. A significant untapped energy source is waste heat, accounting for ~60% of the energy humans produce. Thermoelectrics are materials that can convert heat into useful electrical power, and hence have the potential to impact our energy future. The challenge is to design or discover thermoelectrics with high conversion efficiency, which requires a fundamental understanding of how electrons and heat (phonons) flow in materials.

In this talk, I will give a brief overview of thermoelectrics, discuss our predictive modeling approach and present some of our recent findings from two studies. 1) Electron transport in GeTe, a quasi-2D material, which we predict to have unusual anisotropic properties. 2) Phonon transport across a Si-Ge interface, in which inelastic phonon scattering and non-equilibrium physics play a key role.