MRS Bulletin news coverage on Materials fingerprints

The ability to predict future materials and their properties from the information contained in these repositories is a much sought after goal in materials research. It is then not surprising that this is also a mighty challenge, with few explorers groping in the dark due to a lack of better tools and techniques. A team of researchers at Duke University and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has now employed a set of novel materials fingerprints to quantify a material’s physical, electronic, and geometrical properties and to visually map the underlying similarities in the form of a materials cartogram. Based on this method, the researchers describe a materials space containing superconducting hotspots, which show a high correlation between the physical proximity of the nodes and the critical temperature of the materials they represent.