Thermoelectric materials: a new insight from NMR

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Date/Time:Thursday, 22 Apr 2010 from 4:10 pm to 5:00 pm
Location:Physics 5
Phone:515-294-0849
Channel:College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
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Evgenii (Eugene) Levin, Ames Laboratory DOE and Department of Physics and Astronomy, ISU

Thermoelectric materials are widely used for direct transformation of heat to electricity (Seebeck effect) and for solid state refrigeration (Peltier effect). Efforts to increase the efficiency of thermoelectrics, which include narrow-gap doped tellurium-based semiconductors, require detailed knowledge of their microscopic properties. 125Te and 207Pb nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is used as a local probe for better understanding a nature of some properties of tellurium-based thermoelectrics including local carrier concentration and structure. Several intriguing phenomena, i.e. electronic inhomogeneity and local distortions of the crystal lattice, have been observed by NMR.