Metastable materials, phases that are kinetically trapped in an energetically unfavorable state, offer a tremendous playground to discover new compounds with fascinating properties. In the past, I was primarily studying pressure as a thermodynamic tuning knob to synthesize such metastable materials, and the recent discovery of the first quasi-room-temperature superconductor LaH10 has impressively demonstrated the Read More …

Semiconducting half and, to a lesser extent, full Heusler compounds are promising thermoelectric materials due to their compelling electronic properties with large power factors. However, intrinsically high thermal conductivity resulting in a limited thermoelectric efficiency has so far impeded their widespread use in practical applications. Here, we report the computational discovery of a class of Read More …