The US Department of Energy announced today that it will invest $16 million over the next four years to accelerate the design of new materials through use of supercomputers.
When physicists Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Muller discovered the first high-temperature superconductors in 1986, it didn’t take much imagination to envision the potential technological benefits of harnessing such materials.
Rare earth elements are metals used in technologies from wind turbines and magnetic resonance imaging agents to industrial catalysts and high-definition televisions.