DMREF:SusChEM:Collaborative Research: Design and Synthesis of Novel Magnetic Materials

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Non-technical Description: This collaborative research project will implement new, transformative strategies for the design of novel magnetic materials, with special focus on sustainable materials containing earth-abundant and inexpensive elements. The project will couple a strong experimental effort with recent theoretical advances in quantum modeling algorithms and software, data-mining techniques, and high-performance hardware to accomplish its objectives. Magnets play a crucial role in contemporary technologies. They are essential components in generators, computer hard drives, mobile devices, and in all electric motors. This research will focus on the discovery of new phases with anisotropic structures, high magnetization, high Curie temperatures, high spin polarization and high magnetic anisotropy. Materials with these properties will have important applications in ultra-small spintronics devices, new high-density data-storage schemes and high-energy-product permanent-magnet materials. The broader impact activities of the project will involve graduate education, maintaining contact with the private sector, and outreach to underrepresented groups and middle-school students. Specially designed activities will include the Alice in Wonderland, Nanocamp and STEM after-school, and summer-intern programs. The algorithms, code, and databases created in this research will be made available to other accelerated materials-discovery efforts, and will be placed in the public domain on a website dedicated to this project.Technical Description: The technical design and synthesis of new magnetic materials is an intimidating problem, especially because of the huge numbers of possible combinations of composition and structure. This research will use computationally nonequilibrium explorations and materials-structure prediction coupled with experiment to identify materials with desirable properties. An adaptive genetic algorithm coupled to first-principle codes specifically designed for magnetic properties will be used for structure and property searches. The algorithm will possess the speed and efficiency of classical simulations, while maintaining the accuracy of quantum-based simulations. Concurrent, experimental research will involve novel synthetic techniques and a comprehensive set of characterization methods. With guidance from theory, nonequilibrium processes will be employed to generate transitional-metal-rich (stable and metastable) material phases, including inert-gas condensation techniques, and sputtering methods to synthesize nanoscale clusters and particles, and ultra-fast quenching from the melt to produce bulk materials for sustainable technologies. Comprehensive structural characterization of these material phases will be performed with x-ray and neutron diffraction, and high-resolution electron microscopy; magnetic and electronic-structure studies will be pursued with magnetization, x-ray magnetic circular dichroism and other methods. The characterization of these material phases is key to validate and verify theoretical work, and provide strategies for the synthesis of new materials. The PIs also plan to release codes for the magnetic and structural properties of clusters and solids, named PARSEC and AGA, respectively, as open source and build a user community around the language by ensuring that interested researchers are able to contribute to our codebase. This will allow a wider growth of the project. This aspect is of special interest to the software cluster in the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, which has provided co-funding for this award.