At the frontier between Polar Intermetallic Phases and Incipient Metals – ternary tellurides in the Rare-earth-metal − Ge/Sn/Pb – Tellurium systems

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Simon Steinberg
• Subject Area: Solid State and Surface Chemistry, Material Synthesis
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 511503255

Under consideration of the global challenges, there is a critical need to develop new technologies, which request the design of unprecedented solids serving as their components. In the quest of new solids, high-throughput computational means were previously employed to propose a new class of solids called incipient metals, whose properties are considered to be related to an unqiue type of bonding mechanism. On the other hand, more recent explorations which were accomplished as part of this project demonstrated that it is more helpful to distinguish between materials properties and the nature of chemical bonding; yet, there are still many open questions concerning the mechanism related to the aforementioned materials properties. To answer these questions, the nature of the eletron-phonon interactions in incipient metals will be compared to electron-phonon-scenarios which have been well recognized in the framework of previous explorations. In this context, binary group-IV tellurides will be inspected as representatives of the incipient metals, while the electron-phonon interactions in rare-earth tellurides will serve as references within this project. Furthermore, ternaries arising from the rare-earth-Ge/Sn/Pb-tellurium will be explored in order to identify the rise or the collapse of a respective sort of electron-phonon interaction.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants