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Thermoelectric materials

The anharmonicity blacksmith

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Anharmonicity is a property of lattice vibrations governing how they interact and how well they conduct heat. Experiments on tin selenide, the most efficient thermoelectric material known, now provide a link between anharmonicity and electronic orbitals.

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Figure 1: A simple 1D ball-and-spring model for a transverse acoustic phonon showing phonon–phonon interactions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Joseph P. Heremans is in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, the Department of Physics, and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA,

    Joseph P. Heremans

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  1. Joseph P. Heremans
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Correspondence to Joseph P. Heremans.

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Heremans, J. The anharmonicity blacksmith. Nature Phys 11, 990–991 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3542

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