Please contact the symposium organizers with questions.

The study and development of thermoelectric materials, which convert thermal energy to electrical energy in the solid state, has grown immensely in the past decade from a relatively niche field to a broad research area spanning materials science, condensed matter physics, and solid-state chemistry. Despite several advantages of Thermoelectric energy conversion (TEC) over competing energy conversion methods, there are several outstanding materials challenges to develop inexpensive, earth-abundant, and environmentally-friendly thermoelectric materials with high performance metrics such as efficiency and power delivery.

The proposed TEC symposium will highlight the multidisciplinary aspects of the thermoelectric field by focusing on two important and complementary approaches for the development of new thermoelectric materials: (a) experimental studies focused on the discovery, synthesis and understanding of materials with complexity on the atomic and microstructural levels, and (b) development of novel theoretical methods to predict such materials and structures and their implementation. Part (a) will emphasize recent progress experimental studies of materials including but not limited to: (i) novel ternary and quaternary materials from inorganic material classes such as chalcogenides, pnictides, oxides, (ii) alloys including high entropy alloys, and (iii) multiphase and multinary composites with hierarchical microstructures. As realizing high performance thermoelectric materials requires a careful balance between various transport quantities, complexity in compositions could offer a pathway to solving this problem. In part (b), we will encourage submissions that are focused on new approaches to material discovery and modeling, for example, by using new high-throughput strategies and a-priori predictions of electronic and thermal transport properties.

Topics will include:

• Emerging ternary and quaternary materials for thermoelectric applications
• Structural and chemical characterization of complex materials
• Thermoelectricity in the clean limit (platforms such as graphene, and other 2D materials)
• Electron, phonon, and their coupling in thermoelectric transport and lattice dynamical studies
• Theoretical studies for exploring large phase spaces
• Thermoelectric device studies: Design and optimization

Invited Speakers:

• Gang Chen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
• Zhifeng Ren (University of Houston, USA)
• Claudia Felser (Max Plank Institut, Germany)
• Li Shi (University of Texas, USA)
• Kedar Hippalgaonkar (Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Singapore)
• Susan Kauzlarich (University of California, Davis, USA)
• Boris Kozinsky (Bosch Batteries, USA)
• Vladan Stevanovic (Colorado School of Mines, USA)
• Kanishka Biswas (Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, India)
• Joseph Heremans (The Ohio State University, USA)
• Jeffrey Snyder (Northwestern University, USA)
• Chunlei Wan (Tsinghua Univ., China)
• Jean-Pierre Fleurial (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA)
• Kin Chung Fong (BBN Raytheon, USA)
• Georg Madsen (Technische Universität Wien, Germany)
• Gabi Schierning (Leibniz Institute, Dresden, Germany)
• Eric Toberer (Colorado School of Mines, USA)
• Hsin-jay Wu (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan)

Symposium Organizers