Jun Mao, a former Postdoctoral Fellow and Ph.D. graduate at the Texas Center for Superconductivity, was selected by an international panel for the MIT Technology Review's 35 Under 35 (China) award.
The prestigious designation in the Inventor category was announced in 2023 after a strenuous review process. Mao is currently a Professor at the Harbin Institute of Technology in Shenzhen, China.
Since Joule heating in electronics can significantly impact its performance and stability, electronics that have been used for communication applications have a stringent requirement on temperature. Thermoelectric technology enables rapid heating and cooling via tuning the direction and magnitude of the electric current - this is the only technology that can realize precise temperature control on electronics quickly. However, the application of traditional thermoelectric cooling devices is limited by the commercial Bi2Te3-based alloys. As a result, the discovery of promising better thermoelectric cooling materials is of great significance for promoting the widespread application of thermoelectric cooling technology.
To explore promising candidates that differ from conventional semiconducting materials, Mao mainly focuses on semimetals, a type of material that has long been considered unpromising due to its low Seebeck coefficient. However, he discovered that not all the semimetals will have intrinsically low Seebeck coefficient. As a result, based on the strategy of manipulating the asymmetry of the band structure, Mao has successfully identified the Mg3Bi2-based semimetals with high Seebeck coefficient and very good thermoelectric performance. In fact, this is the first time in the past seven decades that a new thermoelectric cooling material, which is comparable to the commercial n-type Bi2Te3-based alloys, has been identified.
Mao received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Houston in 2018, and then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Texas Center for Superconductivity, both under adviser Zhifeng Ren, M.D. Anderson Chair Professor in the Department of Physics. He joined the Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) in 2021 as a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He plans to develop advanced Mg3Bi2-based thermoelectric coolers in future studies.
Release prepared by TcSUH Office of Public Affairs. Original article in Chinese available here.