Thermal properties

Understanding and controlling the thermal properties of condensed matter systems is not only interesting from the fundamental point of view. It is also a cornerstone for developing thermoelectric materials (which should be as poor heat conductors as possible) and can help to overcome one of the main hitches we nowadays face in order to design smaller nano electronic devices.

I have been studying the thermal properties of (electrically) insulating systems (most of them ferroelectric and/or ferroelastic oxides) close to structural phase transitions in order to further understand how thermal properties of solids can be tuned.