October 6, 2015 - Steady progress in the development of advanced materials has led to modern civilization’s foundational technologies—better batteries, resilient building materials and atom-scale semiconductors. Development of the next wave of materials, however, is being slowed by the sheer complexity of material systems at extremely small scales. Fortunately, the tools and techniques to overcome these challenges are starting to emerge thanks to advances in experimental imaging, data analytics and high-performance computing. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Sergei Kalinin, Bobby Sumpter and Richard Archibald have published an overview of these transformative trends in the October 2015 issue of Nature Materials. “We believe this is the wave of the future—not only for understanding the physics and chemistry that characterize a material but also for manipulating materials to exhibit desirable properties,” Sumpter said.
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