BSA Distinguished Lecture

The development of next-generation materials that address many of the world's most significant challenges requires the exploration of a vast space of new material compositions and structures at both the atomic- and nano-scales. All materials are composed of some combination of the elements that make up the Periodic Table, but traditional approaches to materials discovery have been limited in the scope of possible combinations that can be rapidly synthesized and characterized. This talk will present "nanocombinatorics" as a novel, highly parallel approach to materials discovery. Nanocombinatorics leverages recent advances in nanoscale lithography to rapidly print large libraries of nanomaterial arrays on a surface with millions of different compositions and sizes. Specifically, nanoscale tips are used to deliver polymer droplets loaded with metal precursors to precise locations on a surface. These polymer droplets act as nanoscale reactors that convert, upon heating, into multimetallic nanoparticles with predetermined composition, size, and structural sophistication. To date, our laboratory has used this technique to synthesize combinatorial nanoparticle libraries composed of metals, metal oxides, multimetallic alloys, and phase-segregated structures—many of which have never been made before—with unprecedented speed and precision. This revolutionary approach to materials discovery is expected to lead to new compositions of matter with properties that accelerate breakthroughs in catalysis, energy, electronics, optics, magnetism, and medicine.