March 13, 2015 – Researchers should not have to rely on mere trial and error to create materials for energy applications. To accelerate discoveries that underpin economically important innovations, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory institute takes a new approach by bringing together atomic-scale imaging and computation to find a needle of new knowledge in a haystack of data. “Microscopy gives us eyes to peer into matter more closely than ever before to gain unprecedented insight. Big data allows us to comprehend what we are seeing and use that new knowledge to predict the properties of materials we design,” said Sergei Kalinin, director of ORNL’s Institute for Functional Imaging of Materials. Since the institute’s launch in June, its researchers have submitted several reports of accomplishments to journals, and its first publication (http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150313/ncomms7550/full/ncomms7550.html) has just been issued in Nature Communications.
