Finding Useful Metastable Materials - New Perspectives on an Old Problem

Explore groundbreaking research in materials science through this comprehensive lecture by Dr. Vladan Stevanović from Colorado School of Mines and National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Delve into how modern first-principles electronic structure calculations combined with parallel supercomputing have revolutionized materials discovery. Learn about innovative approaches to identifying and evaluating metastable materials, with particular emphasis on covalent and partially ionic solids. Discover computational methodologies for assessing polymorph realizability and lifetime prediction, including a novel solution for atom-to-atom mapping in periodic systems. Examine emerging techniques for modeling disordered and glassy systems as statistical ensembles of small-cell, periodic local minima, enabling predictive modeling without experimental data. Understand how these theoretical advances are transforming traditional intuition-based materials discovery into a more systematic, theory-guided approach for finding useful metastable materials.