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.