Multicomponent and nanolaminated nitrides for tailored thermal and electrical properties

Controlling the combination of thermal and electrical properties in advanced materials is an important challenge in a wide range of scientific areas ranging from electronic appliances, high-power contacts and components,  thermoelectrics, and cooling.

This proposal aims for strategies for the reduction of thermal conductivity in combination with improved electrical properties, using multicomponent nitrides as model systems.

The applicants’ contributions have shown that chromium nitride-based materials exhibit surprisingly good thermoelectric properties and can be made as both n- and p-type materials.

Groundbreaking advances will require tailoring of composition, disorder, and electronic-structure features to engineer the combination of thermal and electrical transport.

The opportunity to exploit magnetic and configurational disorder together with the anomalously low thermal conductivity of CrN-based materials offers the opportunity for multicomponent alloying with late d-block elements in nitrides to induce complexity.

The project comprises fundamental experimental and theoretical studies on CrN-based multicomponent and high-entropy alloy nitrides, and implementation of quasi-two-dimensional multicomponent structures in nanolaminated nitrides.

The vision is a new type of sophisticated nitrides with tailored thermal and electronic properties realized using thin-film and 2D nonequilibrium synthesis methodology.