NanoColloquium: Kornelius Nielsch - Material Interfaces taking Control of Thermoelectric Transport
Friday, October 2, 2026
Kay Boardroom - Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building
For More Information:
Oded Rabin
oded@umd.edu
https://nanocenter.umd.edu/events/nanocolloquium/index.php?mode=4&id=20726

NanoColloquium 38

Prof. Dr. Kornelius Nielsch

Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden, Germany
Institute of Material Science and Institute of Applied Physics, Technical University of Dresden, Germany

Material Interfaces taking Control of Thermoelectric Transport

The presentation will start with a general introduction on the basic thermoelectric transport effect, explain thermoelectric materials in general, and how these can be used in thermoelectric devices and introduce a few thermoelectric applications. For the core part of this presentation, I will discuss the impact of material interfaces on the thermoelectric transport in general and select three examples, which can let to tailored thermoelectric materials by interface engineering.

Enhancing the thermal stability and suppression of material diffusion in ZnSb compounds by coating the grains of ZnSb with the technique of atomic layer deposition, which allows the conformal coating of nano- and micro-sized powers on the atomic scale and a subsequent compaction.
Thermoelectric multilayer systems are ideal to study separately the impact of the reduced dimension of thin films on the electronic and phononic transport. We have used atomic layer deposition to grow multilayers of Sb2Te3 and SbOx and studied in detail the significant impact of the interfaces on the phonon scattering.
Several prominent thermoelectric materials like Sb2Te3, Bi2Se3 and Bi2Te3 are topological insulators. When these materials are single crystals, the bulk/volume of the crystals is behaving like ordinary highly doped semiconductor, whereas the surface behaves like graphene with highly mobile charge charrier. We will demonstrate that in nanosized materials the topological effects are enhanced and can significantly dominate the thermoelectric transport in these materials.
In summary, the presentation will bridge the areas of solid states physics, solid state chemistry and material engineering and I will give an outlook on the engineering of material interfaces for future thermoelectric applications.

Kornelius Nielsch has been director of the Institute for Metallic Materials (IMW) at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden (IFW) since 2015, where he leads a research group working on sustainable thermoelectric materials and device for thermoelectric cooling.  Prof. Nielsch received his diploma in physics from the University of Duisburg in 1997 and his Ph.D. in physics from Martin Luther University Halle/Wittenberg, Germany, in 2002. From 2002 to 2003, Kornelius Nielsch was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT before taking up the position of group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics in Halle, Germany, in 2003. Soon after, he moved to the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Hamburg, where he was Professor of Experimental Physics from 2007 to 2015. From 2009 until 2015 he has coordinated the Priority Program on Nanostructured Thermoelectrics and is now coordinating the Marie Curie Doctoral Network on Mg-based alloys for thermoelectric cooling together with 15 partner institutions from Europe.

This Event is For: Clark School • Graduate • Undergraduate • Faculty • Staff • Post-Docs