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The ZT (figure of merit) is an apples-to-apples number for comparing one thermoelectric material set to another. Higher is better.

Bismuth Telluride is the standard and has been for decades. It has a ZT of about 1.3. There have been some breakthroughs to exceed that in a few spots, but with limitations. Most of its competitors still exceed a ZT of 1.

This publication’s material is less than 0.01. Not all that newsworthy, unless I’m missing something.

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Paper claims that the innovation of this category of materials is about manufacturability. Organic TEMs can be spray-on thin films and foams filled with cheap bulk powders, rather than growing inorganic planar semiconductors; The downsides have been that they're fragile and they aren't very good (by a factor of ~500 worse than inorganic semiconductor TEMs). They report on making them 5x better performance (so only 100x worse), and dramatically less fragile.

Presumably, this would have very different applications.

I think the idea is to use it for extremely low power "ambient computing" and for example wearables where the human provides the heat source (and which need to be flexible).

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