Scientists in the US have rewritten the rules of materials discovery after creating a new revolutionary way to develop superconductors, by swapping elements inside a crystal.
The team from Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Northwestern University carefully changed the atomic arrangement within a family of inorganic materials made from barium (Ba), antimony (Sb), and a mix of sulfur (S) and tellurium (Te).
The technique resulted in 10 unique compounds with entirely different structures, even though the ratio of elements remained the same for each compound. As per the team, the discovery could help them tailor materials’ properties and speed up advances in materials science.
“We want to find new families,” Mercouri Kanatzidis, PhD, a materials scientist at ANL and professor at Northwestern University, said. “We’re trying to stay ahead of AI so that if we succeed, AI can be trained on our knowledge.”
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