Paper by HFA Associ­ated Fellow Shu-Jen Wang published in the Science Advances

Can you imagine charg­ing your mobile phone by simply using your body heat? It may still sound rather futur­is­tic, but thermo electrics is a promis­ing research field. Thermo electrics is all about trans­form­ing heat into useful energy, mostly using inorganic materials.

Because of their mechan­i­cal flexi­bil­ity, light-weight and low thermal conduc­tiv­ity, organic semicon­duc­tors have emerged as a promis­ing mater­ial system especially for flexi­ble thermo­elec­tric appli­ca­tions. Efficient doping for charge-carrier creation is the key in thermo­elec­tric device perfor­mance. Conven­tional bulk doping typically intro­duces disor­der at high doping concen­tra­tion limit­ing the electri­cal conductivity.

The team, led by Hector Fellow Karl Leo, was able to achieve signif­i­cantly better results with the modula­tion-doping approach than with conven­tional bulk doping. “The main advan­tage of the modula­tion-doping technique is the avoid­ance of ionized impurity scatter­ing in the highly ordered undoped narrow bandgap semicon­duc­tor allow­ing both carrier concen­tra­tion and mobil­ity to be indepen­dently maximized,” states Shu-Jen Wang, Associ­ated Fellow at the Hector Fellow Academy and first author of the paper. Prof. Karl Leo adds: “Our work paves new ways to achieve flexi­ble thermo­elec­tric devices which allow to directly gener­ate electri­cal power from heat in an elegant and efficient way.

Congrat­u­la­tions to Shu-Jen Wang!