The most talented artists can create a one-of-a-kind masterpiece using just a few different paint colors. They achieve this by using inspiration, past artistic knowledge, and principles learned from years of studio practice. Chemists use a similar process when developing new compounds. A research team from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago has created a new technique for identifying and synthesizing crystalline materials containing two or more elements.

“We expect our work to prove extremely valuable to chemistry, materials and condensed matter communities for the synthesis of new and currently unexpected materials with exotic properties,” said Northwestern University associate Argonne chemistry professor Mercury Kanatsidis.

“Our invention method was the result of research on unconventional superconductors,” said Xuquan Zhou, a postdoctoral researcher at Argonne University and first author of the paper. “These are solids that contain two or more elements, at least one of which is not a metal. And they stop resisting the passage of electricity at different temperatures – anywhere from cooler in space to my office temperature.”

In the last 50 years, scientists have discovered and created many unusual superconductors with incredible magnetic and electrical properties. Such materials have a wide variety of potential applications, such as enhanced power generation, energy transmission, and high-speed transportation. They also have the potential to be incorporated into future particle accelerators, magnetic resonance imaging systems, quantum computers and energy-efficient microelectronics.

The team discovery method begins with a two-component solution. One of them is a highly effective solvent. It dissolves and reacts with any solid added to the solution. The other is not such a good solvent. But after adding different elements it’s there to create a reaction to produce a new solid. This setting involves changing the ratio of the two components and the temperature. The temperature here is pretty high, 750 to 1300 degrees Fahrenheit.

“We’re not interested in developing known materials, we’re interested in discovering materials that no one knows about or that theorists don’t even suggest exist,” Kanatsidis said. “With this method, we can avoid reaction pathways to known materials and open new pathways to the unknown and the unpredictable.”

As a test case, the researchers applied their method to crystalline compounds consisting of three to five elements. As recently reported Nature, discovery methods yielded 30 previously unknown compounds. Ten of them have structures never seen before.

The team prepared single crystals of some of these new compounds and characterized their structures in UChicago’s ChemMatCARS beamline at 15-ID-D and 17-BM-B of the Advanced Photon Source X-ray Sciences Division, a user facility of the DOE Office. he did. Science. in the Argonne. “Using the 17-BM-B APS beamline, we were able to follow the evolution of structures for the different chemical phases formed during the reaction process,” said 17-BM-B beamline scientist Wenqian Xu.

“Traditionally, chemists have invented and created new materials based solely on knowledge of starting components and final products,” Zhou said. Said. “The APS data also allowed us to account for intermediates formed during the reaction.”

The Center for Nanoscale Materials, another information center of the Ministry of Economy in Argonne, provided important experimental data and theoretical calculations for the project.

This is only the beginning of what is possible, as the method can be applied to almost any crystalline solid. It can also be used to form many different crystal structures. It consists of several overlapping layers, one atom thick layer, and chains of molecules that are not connected to each other. Such unusual structures have various properties and are key to the development of next-generation materials that apply not only to superconductors, but also to microelectronics, batteries, magnets and more.