The U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames National Laboratory will launch a new research effort, the ML-Accelerated Materials Discovery Center, to drive the discovery and design of complex magnetic and superconducting materials for energy and technology applications.
Materials discovery and design is often a first and fundamental step in developing a new technology. The materials that have just the right combination of unique properties to make a new technology possible are often complex, made up of three or more ingredients with multiple ways to construct them. They exist in nearly endless permutations and combinations to consider in order to find a recipe for technology success—a scientific needle in a haystack. Computer codes developed by Ames researchers show effective methods of searching for structures, and of utilizing machine learning to accelerate the search.