Have you noticed how your phone gets hot? You’re scrolling through your phone, watching TikTok dances or something, when your phone burns through its battery. This is a problem, and it isn’t unique to your phone. Data centers, the warehouses of computers which run the internet and AI, use more electricity than my entire home country of Australia. Our browsing uses more power than most countries! And this energy demand is growing exponentially every year.

The reason for this ravenous energy usage is silicon. Every computer contains billions of silicon transistors. Transistors work by shoving electrons, the carriers of electricity, through them and blocking them with brute force. But electrons stumble blindly through silicon, wasting energy as heat when moving and stopping. This is one reason we are approaching an energy crisis.

How can we avert this crisis? We need electrons to dance elegantly through materials, flowing and stopping with graceful ease. But electrons don’t like moving in silicon, so we need a new material. That’s where I come in. I research the way electrons dance in exotic new materials that are just a few atoms thick.

Experiments found electrons dancing strangely in one such material. So I used computer simulations to figure out what was making these electrons boogie. It turned out that they repelled each other strongly when they got too close, leading to a kind of electronic ballet. Although tiny tutus might be stretching the metaphor a bit.

My simulations also found how to control this ballet by changing the material it was grown on. This understanding helps us to choose the right dance floor for our electrons. From this, we found a material where, given just a little nudge, the dance changes from one which flows to one which is frozen in place. This metal insulator transition could be used to make more efficient transistors for computers.

My research has found new materials in which electrons can dance. If we can teach the electrons in computers to dance, then we can save a ton of electricity, make your phone last longer, and avert the computing energy crisis. And that would be something worth dancing about.

The Eras tour of glassy materials 

You may have missed Taylor Swift's Eras tour; no worries, jump into my time machine, and let's start the Eras Tour of Glassy Materials!

The first stop is Ancient Rome, where we see the Lycurgus Cup. The color of its glass can magically change from opaque green to translucent red under different lighting conditions. 

Fast forward to the Modern Era, the glass light bulb was invented, enlightening the world. 

Today, we find glassy materials at the heart of our digital lives. 

From the sleek screens of our smartphones to the advanced batteries that power our devices.

As we enter the new era of AI, data-driven approaches take the forefront. 

Therefore, the Materials Project in the Lab is dedicated to generating and maintaining the largest and most popular database for crystalline materials. 

However, no database exists for glassy materials, where atoms are not aligned regularly like crystals, and it's more expensive to simulate.  

This is where I started generating the largest database for glassy materials, which includes ~5000 different compounds. For each compound, we have a record of how all its atoms move and interact at different temperatures. 

From these, we can calculate the properties, such as diffusivity, which is a metric used to quantify how hard it is for ions to move through materials. just like how hard it is for Taylor to navigate through her fans' crowd.

How can you use this database? Easy? Just like you, how you use Google for any information search.  

The database is also a valuable resource for developing machine learning models. 

The one I developed to predict diffusivity is just one click on your laptop. That is ~7000 times swifter than traditional simulations that can only be run on supercomputers. What a huge saving on electricity!

What's the next star for glassy materials? 

It's hidden in our database and has the potential to boost the U.S. economy just like Taylor Swift's Eras Tour did. 

Movies would have us believe that the world shall end with a bang, with something dramatic like an alien invasion. But let us be real. It’s the 21st century- the likely cause is going to be climate change. 

The cause for climate change is clear: elevated carbon dioxide or CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. The solution: also, pretty clear: remove all of the excess CO2. And say you are able to do that, then what? What happens to all of that CO2 you have collected? The smarter thing to do would be to convert it to valuable products like alcohols that can make you some money. Right now, on one side, we have many materials are promising capturers and many others that are promising converters. But there are issues. Moving the CO2 from the capture location to the conversion location means that you have to spend a lot of energy compressing it and then transporting it. Imagine a material that could do both capture and conversion simultaneously!! That would be ultimate, right, zero distance, zero additional costs. Think that is hard, well, nature does it all the time with trees!!

That is what I plan to work on: on artificial trees. Turns out, copper when subject to electricity is really good for conversion. But I need to choose a good capture material where I can incorporate copper easily. Metal organic frameworks or MOFs contain metal atoms that are linked using large organic molecules and are a really good candidate. Why? Because I can easily replace some of the general metal atoms with copper to get a material that does both capture and conversion. While this hasn’t been done yet, but by simulating the interaction of CO2 with this framework, I can get one step closer to creating these artificial trees. While they are preliminary ideas right now, you might even call them seedlings, I am hopeful that one day they will branch out and have a tree-mendous impact in the future!