About this Abstract |
| Meeting |
MS&T25: Materials Science & Technology
|
| Symposium
|
Energy Materials for Sustainable Development
|
| Presentation Title |
Uncovering a New Bonding Class: Metavalent Materials and Their Unusual Thermal Transport Properties |
| Author(s) |
Keivan Esfarjani, Ali Rayat, Safoura Nayeb Sadeghi, James Xu |
| On-Site Speaker (Planned) |
Keivan Esfarjani |
| Abstract Scope |
Effective thermal management is crucial for enhancing the performance of heat engines and cooling devices. While regular crystal structures can exhibit low thermal conductivity due to the nature of their chemical bonding, recent studies have identified metavalent bonding as a key mechanism underlying ultralow thermal conductivities in certain solids. In this presentation, we introduce and rigorously characterize metavalent bonding as a distinct type of chemical bond, highlighting its unique features and its impact on phonon transport. We further demonstrate that materials exhibiting this bonding type naturally emerge as a separate class through unsupervised classification of bonding characteristics across a wide range of compounds. Our results provide both a conceptual framework and computational evidence for understanding the thermal properties of metavalently bonded materials, with implications for designing next-generation thermoelectrics and thermal insulators. |