The world’s best artists can take a few different colored paints and create a masterpiece that looks like nothing else. They do this by drawing upon inspiration, knowledge of past works, and design principles learned through years of experience. Chemists follow a similar process when inventing new compounds. Researchers from Northwestern University, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of Chicago have recently developed a new method for discovering and creating new crystalline materials with two or more elements.
The details of this method were published in the journal Nature last month.
“We expect that our work will prove extremely valuable to the chemistry, materials and condensed matter communities for synthesizing new and currently unpredictable materials with exotic properties,” Northwestern’s Mercouri Kanatzidis said.
Kanatzidis, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, is the paper’s corresponding author. He has a joint appointment at Argonne.
In the past 50 years, scientists have discovered and created many unconventional superconductors with unique magnetic and electrical properties. These materials have a wide range of potential applications, including improved power generation, energy transmission, and high-speed transportation. They also have the potential to be used in future particle accelerators, magnetic resonance imaging systems, quantum computers, and energy-efficient microelectronics.
Learn more in Northwestern Now’s article, “Making the unimaginable possible in materials discovery.”