Accelerated Design and Synthesis of Materials and Molecules

What’s your vision for materials and chemistry research at Berkeley Lab 5-10 years from now?

Novel materials and molecules drive key energy technologies developed at Berkeley Lab. The manner in which we design and synthesize these structures is undergoing a fundamental transformation: Traditional approaches are being accelerated through a combination of sophisticated modeling, artificial intelligence, and integration with multimodal and in situ characterization. LBNL has been a leader in these individual fields, and integrating these approaches seamlessly may require entirely new infrastructure that cannot be housed in existing spaces. New materials and chemistry buildings at Charter Hill would provide a unique opportunity to create a shared home dedicated to bringing together LBNL’s diverse subject matter experts under one roof so that they can combine their expertise, initiate joint investigations, and leverage cutting-edge capabilities for the discovery of advanced materials and molecules.

This workshop will establish the essential components for such a space and identify the long-term scientific challenges that will be addressed by, and best motivate, its unique capabilities. We will identify critical knowledge gaps, bottlenecks, and untapped potential in the design of new materials and molecules. Scientific challenges and opportunities will be explored in different contexts in cross-disciplinary breakout sessions with topics such as advanced manufacturing, atomically precise synthesis, and inverse design. Breakout sessions focused on capabilities will discuss topics such as the use of AI to guide synthesis, infrastructure that facilitates connections between theory and experiments, and the development of new instrumentation to investigate synthesis on different time and length scales. These capabilities could include new multimodal and in situ probes, infrastructure for autonomous experimentation and data collection, as well as controlled synthesis environments that allow for real-time manipulation of experiments.