A new European Centre of Excellence will bring together physicists, chemists, materials, and computer scientists and industry to develop a Materials Encyclopaedia to facilitate the discovery, creation and utilisation of new materials. Researchers from DTU Physics participate together with ten other leading materials science centres and super-computing centres. The project is funded for an initial three years, for almost 5 million euro, under the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme.
Materials science and engineering is the exploration of how materials behave and how they may be utilized in technological systems. New materials influence all aspects of our society, as they are important in the development of essentially every new commercial product, be it for better or novel solar panels, harder surfaces, lighter metals, and countless other applications. The number of different materials is very large - virtually infinite; so far we only know very few of those materials and the potential value of new materials is enormous.
However, the integration of electronic-structure theory for materials and databases of computational materials science data, remains a major challenge. NOMAD will develop a Materials Encyclopaedia that offers in-depth characterization of materials and their properties from computed data. It will enable searches for materials that exhibit desired properties and functions, to meet specific scientific or industrial requirements. Powerful visualisation and virtual-reality tools, offering multi-level, multi-dimensional navigation of the data will be developed and made available.
Furthermore, the CoE’s scientists will devise novel tools that can identify hitherto-unknown structure and trends in the large chemical compound space – an important tool for identifying promising new materials. These actions will help to identify new physical phenomena; they will advance materials science and engineering, and may yield novel technological devices and products.
The NOMAD CoE partners are:
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft:
Prof. Matthias Scheffler, Fritz Haber Institute, Berlin (coordinator)
Stefan Heinzel, Max Planck Computing and Data Facility, Garching
Prof. Angel Rubio, Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, Hamburg
King’s College London: Prof. Alessandro De Vita
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin: Prof. Claudia Draxl
University of Cambridge: Prof. Daan Frenkel
University of Barcelona: Prof. Francesc Illas
Aalto University, Helsinki: Prof. Risto Nieminen
Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby: Prof. Kristian Sommer Thygesen
Leibniz-Rechenzentrum, Garching: Prof. Arndt Bode
CSC - IT Center for Science, Helsinki: Dr. Kimmo Koski
Barcelona Supercomputing Center: Dr. Jose Maria Cela
Pintail Ltd: Ciaran Clissmann