Pioneer strategy for creating new materials

Making something new is never easy. Scientists constantly theorize about new materials, but when the material is manufactured it doesn't always work as expected. To create a new strategy for designing materials, scientists combined two different approaches at two different facilities to synthesize new materials. This new strategy gives faster feedback on what growth schemes are best, thus shortening the timeframe to manufacture a new, stable material for energy transport and conversion applications.

A recent article in Nature Materials describes how researchers used X-ray scattering during a process called molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) to observe the behavior of atoms as a type of material known as layered oxides were being formed. These observations were then used as data for computational predictions of new materials, leading to insights on how to best combine atoms to form new, stable structures.