title: Accelerated search for materials with targeted properties by adaptive design.
abstract: Finding new materials with targeted properties has traditionally been guided by intuition, and trial and error. With increasing chemical complexity, the combinatorial possibilities are too large for an Edisonian approach to be practical. Here we show how an adaptive design strategy, tightly coupled with experiments, can accelerate the discovery process by sequentially identifying the next experiments or calculations, to effectively navigate the complex search space. Our strategy uses inference and global optimization to balance the trade-off between exploitation and exploration of the search space. We demonstrate this by finding very low thermal hysteresis (ΔT) NiTi-based shape memory alloys, with Ti50.0Ni46.7Cu0.8Fe2.3Pd0.2 possessing the smallest ΔT (1.84 K). We synthesize and characterize 36 predicted compositions (9 feedback loops) from a potential space of ∼800,000 compositions. Of these, 14 had smaller ΔT than any of the 22 in the original data set.
authors.affiliation: Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, MS-B262, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA.|State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China.
authors.forename: Dezhen
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Xue
authors.affiliation: Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, MS-B262, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA.
authors.forename: Prasanna V
authors.initials: PV
authors.lastname: Balachandran
authors.affiliation: Computer and Computational Sciences, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA.
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hogden
authors.affiliation: Intelligence and Space Research, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA.
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Theiler
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China.
authors.forename: Deqing
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Xue
authors.affiliation: Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, MS-B262, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA.
authors.forename: Turab
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Lookman