Data analytics accelerates the experimental discovery of new thermoelectric materials with extremely high figure of merit

Thermoelectric (TE) materials are among very few sustainable yet feasible energy solutions of present time. This huge promise of energy harvesting is contingent on identifying/designing materials having higher efficiency than presently available ones. However, due to the vastness of the chemical space of materials, only its small fraction was scanned experimentally and/or computationally so far. Employing a compressed-sensing based symbolic regression in an active-learning framework, we have not only identified a trend in materials’ compositions for superior TE performance, but have also predicted and experimentally synthesized several extremely high performing novel TE materials. Among these, we found polycrystalline p-type Cu0.45Ag0.55GaTe2 to possess an experimental figure of merit as high as ~2.8 at 827 K. This is a breakthrough in the field, because all previously known thermoelectric materials with a comparable figure of merit are either unstable or much more difficult to synthesize, rendering them unusable in large-scale applications. The presented methodology demonstrates the importance and tremendous potential of physically informed descriptors in material science, in particular for relatively small data sets typically available from experiments at well-controlled conditions.