Answer 1:
What an excellent question!
Much like the rest of research, the process of
finding new materials can often be quite
non-linear.
One way that has emerged in the era of big data is
the idea of generating tons of materials data and
trying to learn from the trends that emerge.
This can be accomplished experimentally or with
supercomputers. Experimentally, it's possible by
for instance just combining small amounts of some
set of elements at various concentrations and
ratios, and measuring whatever property you are
looking for to see how the different
concentrations and ratios affect each independent
variable. It's a similar idea with supercomputers,
where we let state-of-the-art computational
techniques simulate new material combinations and
see what kinds of new properties emerge. This
practice is known as high-throughput materials
discovery. You can learn more about it through the
Materials Genome
Initiative "
(and the like, such as the Materials
Project ).
In some instances, you can mine the data in
existing literature to see what kinds of trends
emerge. An example of
this
has been done with thermoelectric materials, a
class of materials capable of turning heat into
electricity and vice versa. However, it turns out
that having enough, good quality materials
property data is quite difficult. Even for basic
materials properties like electrical conductivity,
the scientific literature can vary significantly,
and in some instances the measurement hasn't been
done yet! The story gets more complicated as the
process in which you make a new material can
significantly change the property you measure. For
instance, some materials can be grown
crystalline
(where there is long-range order to the atoms) or
amorphous/glassy (where there is
short-range order
to the atoms) depending on the growth technique.
In this case, you can go about it the other way-
try to identify common physical principles that
enhance or suppress a certain material property
and use your intuition and experience to figure
out a potential new material. In this instance,
you can conduct research to understand some
physical phenomenon in-depth and use those
insights to guide where to look next. This is
where the periodic table comes in handy as it
organizes elements in meaningful trends that can
be translated into physical intuition for how
materials themselves behave. Similarly, you can go
about it using theoretical toy models that,
while
they don't represent an actual physical system,
captures the meat of the problem.
Sometimes we discover new properties of known
materials by subjecting them to new temperature
and pressures. This is more or less what happened
in the discovery of superconductors, materials
that past a critical temperature have zero
electrical resistance (read more about it
here
). This has since launched the race to discover
room-temperature superconductors.
And this is from where the richness of scientific
research comes- there are so many ways to go about
answering the same question and you're bound to
learn something different in any method you
choose!
Hope this helps,
Best,
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