Eric Toberer wins 2011 ITS Young Investigator Award

Former Posdoc Eric Toberer is now Assistant Professor of Physics at Colorado School of Mines.

Alloys of PbTe have been used to generate electricity from heat on NASA space missions for 50 years and now are being considered for use on Earth for automotive waste heat recovery. Caltech has recently demonstrated that the zT of PbTe and PbSe alloys can be tuned to be much better than previously thought possible due, in part, to the exceptionally high valley degeneracy.

• Press Coverage: ScienceMag - PhysicsWorld - AmericanScientist - ArsTechnica
• "Convergence of electronic bands for high performance bulk thermoelectrics" Nature 473, 66 (2011)
• "High thermoelectric figure of merit in heavy hole dominated PbTe" Energy and Environmental Science vol, in press (2011)
• "Reevaluation of PbTe1-xIx as high performance n-type thermoelectric material" Energy and Environmental Science vol, in press (2011)
• "Heavily doped p-type PbSe with high thermoelectric performance: an alternative of PbTe" Advanced Materials vol, in press (2011)

The rich solid-state chemistry of Zintl phases enables a directed search and optimization of new complex thermoelectric materials. Several new Zintl Phases have been found with low thermal conductivity and can be doped to have high zT.

• "Zintl Chemistry for Designing High Efficiency Thermoelectric Materials" Chemistry of Materials, 22 p624 (2010)
• "Ca₃AlSb₃: an inexpensive, non-toxic thermoelectric material for waste heat recovery" Energy and Environmental Science 4, 510 (2011)
• "The Zintl compound Ca₅Al₂Sb₆ for low cost thermoelectric power generation" Advanced Functional Materials 20, 4357 (2010)