Advances in the development and growth of functional materials: Toward the paradigm of materials by design
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troduction Now, perhaps more than at any previous time, there is widespread appreciation of the urgent need for new functional materials and the critical role they play in matters of great importance to energy, the environment, sustainability, and the economy. A number of recent panel reports in the United States, including those coordinated by the National Research Council (NRC),1 the Department of Energy,2 and the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the National Science and Technology Council,3 have emphasized the importance of new, enabling materials in the economy and the need to critically examine the current status and future prospects. With support and encouragement from the US National Science Foundation, the authors of this contribution organized a workshop in 2011 on the theme of “Materials by Design” (http://www.mbd.mrl.ucsb.edu). Broadly defined, “Materials by Design” has the goal of achieving desired properties in materials through appropriate tuning of composition, structure, and architecture, which enables a given application. The expertise represented at the workshop ranged from solid-state chemistry, to organic,
hybrid, nano, and liquid crystalline materials, to crystal growth, condensed matter experiment, and included both pencil-and-paper and computational theory. The questions of most interest to the participants were: How does one go about increasing the efficiencies in the process of new materials development, and concurrently to achieve this end, how does one make better, more effective use of theory and computation? While the workshop participants were primarily based in the United States, we believe the findings presented have global relevance. Indeed, the integrated approaches to “Materials by Design” lend themselves very well to international collaborations. As a starting point, we consider a typical fl owchart (Figure 1a) depiction of the process of envisioning/designing and preparing a new material for a particular application, also sometimes referred to as discovery synthesis. Theory and chemical intuition—often in conjunction with the known literature— can combine to suggest a target material, but in many cases, the material produced is not that intended, so the role of serendipity cannot be overlooked. The synthesis of the material,
Ram Seshadri, University of California, Santa Barbara; [email protected] Stephanie L. Brock, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI; [email protected] Arthur Ramirez, University of California, Santa Cruz; [email protected] M.A. Subramanian, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR; [email protected] Mark E. Thompson, University of Southern California, Los Angeles; [email protected] DOI: 10.1557/mrs.2012.147
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MRS BULLETIN • VOLUME 37 • JULY 2012 • www.mrs.org/bulletin
© 2012 Materials Research Society
ADVANCES IN FUNCTIONAL MATERIALS: TOWARD THE PARADIGM OF MATERIALS BY DESIGN
mentioned previously points to the weakened status of efforts in the United States that are focused on crystal growth, including the growth of high quality thin films
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