© IFP

The group is engaged in the basic research of intermetallic compounds with non-trivial electronic features suited to reveal novel phenomena such as exotic magnetic states, unconventional superconductivity or strongly enhanced thermoelectricity. Non-trivial electronic features may result from specific magnetic interactions as, e.g., the Kondo effect or geometrical frustration, from specific crystal symmetries as, e.g., a non-centrosymmetric one, from an effectively reduced electronic structure or they may result from a metal to insulator transitions.

For some of these materials it became feasible, transfer results of basic research straight into technological applications and in this respect the group has been successful in particular with thermoelectric materials, where on the one hand new concepts have been developed for increasing thermoelectric performance and on the other hand, via cooperation with industrial partners, patents have been realized for practical technological applications.    

The experimental equipment of the group comprises - amongst others - installations for measuring transport properties such as electrical resistivity, thermal conductivity, Seebeck, Hall, and Nernst effects, thermal properties such as thermal expansion, specific heat capacity as well as magnetic properties such as magnetization, magnetic susceptibility, and magnetostriction in a wide phase-space of parameters such as temperature, magnetic field and hydrostatic pressure.

Industrial and academic partners are, amongst others, AVL, TIAG and ESS, Universities of Vienna, Kyoto (JP), L’viv (Ukraine), Gdansk University of Technology (PL) and research institutions such as NIMS (Tsukuba, Japan), Chinese Academy of Sciences (Shenyang, China) or ISIS (UK).