High-throughput synthesis of bulk inorganic materials is crucial for accelerating functional materials discovery but is hindered by slow, energy-intensive solid-state methods. We introduce Direct Joule-Heated Synthesis (DJS), a rapid, single-step and scalable solid-state synthesis technique achieving a 105-fold speedup and 20,000x energy efficiency improvement over conventional synthesis. DJS enables the synthesis of dense, bulk chalcogenides (Bi0.5Sb1.5Te3, AgSbTe2), achieving a zT of 2.3 at 573 K in optimally Cd/Se co-doped AgSbTe2, one of the highest for polycrystalline materials at this temperature. DJS enables optimal co-doping and rapid, non-equilibrium solidification, producing lamellar microstructures, interfacial regions, and cation-ordered nanodomains that scatter all-scale phonons, achieving ultralow lattice thermal conductivity (~0.2 Wm−1K−1 at 573 K). DJS establishes a new benchmark for scalable and fast synthesis, accelerating functional material discovery.
@article{arxiv.2506.04447,
title = {Direct Joule-Heated Non-Equilibrium Synthesis Enables High Performing Thermoelectrics},
author = {Chenguang Zhang and Jose Recatala-Gomez and Zainul Aabdin and Yi Jiang and Luyang Jiang and Sze Yu Tan and Hong Liu and Yuting Qian and Coryl Jing Jun Lee and Sabrine Hachmioune and Vaishali Taneja and Anqi Sng and Pawan Kumar and Haiwen Dai and Zhiqian Lin and Weng Weei Tjiu and Fengxia Wei and Qianhong She and D. V. Maheswar Repaka and David Scanlon and Kanishka Biswas and Yee Kan Koh and Kedar Hippalgaonkar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.04447},
year = {2025}
}