Combinatorial approach to materials discovery

Ichiro Takeuchi

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

University of Maryland

Throughout the history of mankind, scientists and engineers have relied on the slow and serendipitous trial-and-error approach for compounds discovery. In the 1990s, the combinatorial approach was pioneered in the pharmaceutical industry in order to dramatically increasing the rate at which new chemicals are identified. The high-throughout concept is now widely being applied to a variety of fields. We have developed combinatorial thin film synthesis and characterization techniques in order to perform rapid survey of previously unexplored material space in search of new inorganic functional materials. Various thin film deposition schemes including pulsed laser deposition, co-sputtering, and electron-beam deposition are implemented for fabricating discrete combinatorial libraries as well as composition spreads of metal oxide systems and metallic alloy systems. A suite of high-throughput characterization tools including scanning SQUID microscopes and microwave microscopes are employed to track change in physical properties of the materials as a function of sweeping composition changes. In this talk, applications of the combinatorial methodology to multiferroic materials will be discussed.