Planetary Nebula Surveys: Past, Present and Future

In this review we cover the detection, identification and astrophysical importance of planetary nebulae (PN). The legacy of the historic Perek & Kohoutek and Acker et al. catalogues is briefly covered before highlighting the more recent but significant progress in PN discoveries in our Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds. We place particular emphasis on the major MASH and the IPHAS catalogues, which, over the last decade alone, have essentially doubled Galactic and LMC PN numbers. We then discuss the increasing role and importance that multi-wavelength data is playing in both the detection of candidate PN and the elimination of PN mimics that have seriously biased previous PN compilations. The prospects for future surveys and current efforts and prospects for PN detections in external galaxies are briefly discussed due to their value both as cosmic distance indicators and as kinematical probes of galaxies and dark matter properties.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of the Asymmetric Planetary Nebula V Conference (Invited Review, Lake District, England, June 2010

Thermoelectric properties of AgGaTe2_2 and related chalcopyrite structure materials

We present an analysis of the potential thermoelectric performance of p-type AgGaTe$_{2}$, which has already shown a $ZT$ of 0.8 with partial optimization, and observe that the same band structure features, such as a mixture of light and heavy bands and isotropic transport, that lead to this good performance are present in certain other ternary chalcopyrite structure semiconductors. We find that optimal performance of AgGaTe$_2$ will be found for hole concentrations between 4 $\times 10^{19}$ and 2 $\times 10^{20}$cm$^{-3}$ at 900 K, and 2 $\times 10^{19}$ and 10$^{20}$ cm$^{-3}$ at 700 K, and that certain other chalcopyrite semiconductors might show good thermoelectric performance at similar doping ranges and temperatures if not for higher lattice thermal conductivity

Thermoelectric properties of β{\beta}-FeSi2_{\text2}

We investigate the thermoelectric properties of ${\beta}$-FeSi$_{\text2}$ using first principles electronic structure and Boltzmann transport calculations. We report a high thermopower for both \textit{p}- and \textit{n}-type ${\beta}$-FeSi$_{\text2}$ over a wide range of carrier concentration and in addition find the performance for \textit{n}-type to be higher than for the \textit{p}-type. Our results indicate that, depending upon temperature, a doping level of 3$\times10{^{20}}$ - 2$\times10{^{21}}$ cm${^{-3}}$ may optimize the thermoelectric performance