Nanostructured Transition-Metal Clathrates and Clathrate-Oxide Nanocomposites

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Silke Bühler-Paschen; Professor Dr. Georg K. H. Madsen; Dr. Helge Rosner; Professorin Dr. Anke Weidenkaff
• Subject Area: Experimental Condensed Matter Physics
• Term: from 2012 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 220597078

For widespread applications in waste heat recovery, thermoelectric materials should be environmentally benign, cheap, durable, and efficient. Most of the well-known thermoelectrics fail in at least one respect. This project calls nanostructured intermetallic clathrates and clathrate-oxide nanocomposites before the curtain. Together with two PhD students and one part-time PostDoc to be hired by the project, an interdisciplinary team of physicists and chemists, experimentalists and theoreticians, specialists on clathrates and oxides, from Bochum University, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research, and Vienna University of Technology will carry out an ambitious research project that sets out to advance the fundamental understanding in the field, and to provide advanced new thermoelectric materials. Focus will be on transition metal containing clathrates and oxides, including cheap representatives like the clathrate Ba8CuxSi46−x . Different nanostructuring and compaction techniques for bulk materials will be explored. The results of in-depth structural, analytical, and physical property characterizations will be compared to results on well defined model system – clathrate nanowires, that have never been made before. Density functional theory will be performed both for the electrons and for the lattice, taking defects and finite size explicitely into account.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1386: Nanostructured Thermoelectric Materials: Theory, Model Systems and Controlled Synthesis
• International Connection: Austria