Trailblazing research on data-driven materials science

05-Dec-2024 - Many breakthroughs are needed in the discovery of new materials, especially for sustainable economic development based on renewable energy and carbon-neutral industrial circular processes. The BiGmax research network has investigated how data-driven approaches can be used for such breakthroughs ...

Efficient discovery of improved energy materials by a new AI-guided workflow

These can help alleviate the ongoing energy crisis

21-Jul-2023 - Scientists of the NOMAD Laboratory at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society recently proposed a workflow that can dramatically accelerate the search for novel materials with improved properties. They demonstrated the power of the approach by identifying more than 50 strongly ...

New Discovery: Toward sugar origami

Folded carbohydrates could open up completely new perspectives in biomedicine and materials science

06-Jul-2023 - Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (MPICI) have designed a carbohydrate sequence capable of folding into a stable secondary structure. Until now, such self-folding biopolymers had only been developed for DNA and proteins, and sugars were previously considered too ...

Slim steel - strong and safe

A material made from a few readily available components is very strong in tension and is nevertheless highly formable

31-Jan-2023 - Until now, developers of steels have had to make a choice: Either they increase the tensile strength of the material and usually accept that their material becomes relatively brittle. Or they rely on the fact that the steel can be strongly stretched and thus absorb a lot of energy in the event of ...

Discovering new materials with the help of machine learning

International research team publishes universal framework in the journal Science

12-Oct-2022 - Novel materials are the key for our transition to a more sustainable economy. However, the search for and design of new materials matching specific technology requirements are time and cost-intensive. Especially for high-entropy alloys that are solid solutions of multiple principal elements, the ...

Natural super glue from mistletoe berries

A promising discovery

21-Jun-2022 - A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (MPICI) and McGill University in Canada discovered strong adhesive properties of white-berry mistletoe. The mistletoe berry's flexible fibers adhere to both skin and cartilage as well as to various synthetic materials ...

Ice on gold

Breakthrough in material science: analysing frozen water atom by atom

09-Dec-2020 - How to analyse ice down to its atomic scale? And how to analyse objects embedded in ice without melting it? An international team of material scientists mainly from the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung (MPIE) found a way to analyse micron-thick layers of ice by atom probe tomography (APT) ...

Topology Gets Magnetic: The New Wave Of Topological Magnetic Materials

Researchers demonstrate new high-throughput method for discovering magnetic topology

24-Nov-2020 - The electronic structure of nonmagnetic crystals can be classified by complete theories of band topology, reminiscent of a “topological periodic table.” However, such a classification for magnetic materials has so far been elusive, and hence very few magnetic topological materials have been ...

Photons in a can

A new way to design materials

16-Nov-2020 - Crystal symmetry is one of the decisive physical attributes that determines the properties of a material. In particular, the behaviour of an electron is largely affected by the symmetry of the crystal which in turn governs the fundamental behaviour of the material, such as its conductive or ...

Self-healing soft material outsmarts nature

New stretchable material entirely recovers its structure and properties at the blink of an eye – and it can do this over and over again

30-Jul-2020 - A soft material that heals itself instantaneously is now reality. A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and at Pennsylvania State University tune the nanostructure of a new stretchable material in such a way that it now entirely recovers its structure and ...