Materials Navigator – system for mapping the materials space

New materials have been key drivers and enablers of progress throughout the history, with many established and emerging technologies depending crucially on carefully engineered complex materials. However, the search for new materials is still very slow and inefficient, with scientists having to rely mostly on heuristic rules, intuition, and personal expertise. This situation creates opportunities for new research tools. The knowledge collected over centuries of scientific exploration should be used to create knowledge guiding and accelerating the search for novel materials. In order to make an effective and efficient use of this information, however, it needs to be accessed, structured and then presented in a rational way. This proposal will develop a tool that properly organizes and visualizes groups of related materials, helping identify important patterns and relations between composition, structure, and physical properties. By analyzing these groups, researchers will be able to better understand the materials in them, viewing them not as isolated instances, but as samples from a manifold of related compounds, with properties obeying internal rules and logic. This will allow materials scientists to quickly focus on a small group of promising materials for further exploration, streamlining the research process and reducing the need for expensive and time-consuming experiments and computer simulations. This is of great interest to scientists in both academic and government research institutions, as well as industrial research and development centers and labs. The potential savings in money and time achieved by the use of this tool can be significant.