Thermoelectricity

Joseph Heremans is a fellow at Delphi Corporation’s research laboratory. Delphi is one of the leading manufacturers of automotive air conditioning, an area of application for thermoelectric cooling. Heremans has written about 15 research articles (3 in Phys. Rev. Lett.) and several review articles on thermoelectric properties of nanowires, mostly from the point of view of their electronic transport properties. Gang Chen is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and specializes in the field of thermal conductivity of low-dimensional materials, and thermodynamics. He is the author of multiple research papers on the subject of low-dimensional thermoelectric materials, particularly from the point of view of phonon heat conduction. Mildred Dresselhaus is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has written several tutorial monographs, including for Springer Verlag. She has been working in the field of low-dimensional thermoelectrics since its inception. She is the author of the seminal research paper of the field, in 1993, as well as of the review articles that will constitute the core of the proposed book. Professor Brian Derby, the editor of the Engineering Materials and Processes series has acknowledged that these authors are preeminent in their field and welcomed their book proposal as a volume in his series.

Introduction and history.- Basic Transport Equations and Phenomenological Theory.- Thermoelectric Couples (to get to the concept of figure of merit).- Theory: electrons.- Theory: phonons.- Experimental study of actual systems.- Directions for future work.- Conclusions.