The grand prize would be a room-temperature superconductor, a material that could revolutionize computing and electricity but has eluded scientists for decades.
Innovative labs like Leela Sciences have ambitions beyond designing and creating new materials. He wants to “build an AI scientist” — specifically, an expert in the physical sciences. “The LLM chemistry knowledge is pretty good at breaking down the physics knowledge, and now we’re trying to build on that by teaching how to do science—for example, doing simulations, doing experiments, doing theoretical modeling,” Kubik says.
Like Leela Sciences, the approach is based on the expectation that a better understanding of the science behind substances and their composition will provide clues that can help researchers explore a wider range of topics. One target of frequent labs is materials with properties interpreted as quantum effects, such as new types of magnets. The grand prize would be a room-temperature superconductor, a material that could revolutionize computing and electricity but has eluded scientists for decades.
Superconductors are materials in which electricity flows without resistance and thus without generating heat. So far, the best of these materials become superconducting only at relatively low temperatures and require significant cooling. If they can be made to operate at or near room temperature, they could lead to far more efficient power grids, new types of quantum computers, and even more practical high-speed magnetic surface trains.
Cody O’Loughlin
The failure to find a room-temperature superconductor has been a major disappointment in materials science over the past few decades. I was there when President Reagan spoke about the technology in 1987, during a boom in newly developed ceramics that became superconducting at the relatively low temperature of 93 K (that’s −292 °F), and suggested that he “Bring us to the threshold of a new era. There was a sense of optimism among scientists and business people in that packed ballroom at the Washington Hilton as Reagan “anticipated many benefits, not least among them less dependence on foreign oil, a cleaner environment and a stronger national economy.” In retrospect, this would have been one of the last times we put our economic and technological aspirations on advances in materials.
The promised new age never came. Scientists still haven’t found a material that becomes superconducting under normal conditions at room temperature, or anywhere near it. The best current superconductors are brittle and tend to form loci wires.
One reason is that finding high-temperature superconductors has been so difficult that no theory explains the effect at relatively high temperatures—or it cannot be predicted simply by the placement of atoms in the structure. It will ultimately contact lab scientists to synthesize any interesting candidates, test them, and search the resulting data for clues to understanding the still-puzzling phenomenon. Doing so, says Kubik, is one of the labs’ top priorities.
AI in charge
It can take a researcher a year or more to create a crystal structure for the first time. This is usually followed by further work to test its properties and find out how the method is needed in large quantities for a commercial product.