MRSEC: Center for Materials Innovations at Michigan

Non-technical Description: This Center for Materials Innovations at Michigan will establish a transformative campus-wide ecosystem to accelerate the design, discovery, and deployment of novel materials critical for the Industries of Tomorrow, including advanced manufacturing, clean energy/sustainability, artificial intelligence, and future semiconductors. Embedded in the ecosystem is a long-term partnership between UM researchers and collaborators from industry, academia, and national laboratories.

Building upon the principles of the Materials Genome Initiative, the interdisciplinary research groups combine computational, statistical, theoretical, and experimental approaches to examine processing-structure-property relationships in novel semiconductor heterostructures for advanced quantum information processing and reconfigurable polymers that are environmentally sustainable. The Center structure emphasizes the integration of research and education, with an emphasis on attracting/retaining the next generation of materials researchers: a diverse body of researchers reflecting society at large.

To build and maintain the campus-wide ecosystem, the Center will work to engage all materials researchers through a suite of activities aimed at broadening participation and enhancing knowledge transfer. The Center is positioned to respond to emerging opportunities through its Seed projects.

Technical Description: The Center for Materials Innovations at Michigan will establish two interdisciplinary research groups. IRG1, "Endotaxial 2D Polytype Heterostructures", will define a new class of materials wherein distinct polytypes are synthesized within each other (endotaxy), to create robust, novel quantum states at ultra-clean 2D interfaces.

The approach consists of computationally-driven prediction of endotaxial materials and their distinct properties, followed by synthesis of endotaxial materials compatible with nanoelectronics processing, discovery of novel quantum states, and demonstration of endotaxial devices. These previously elusive quantum states are expected to enable rapid progress in classical and quantum information processing.

IRG2, "Covalent Adaptable Networks (CAN) for Sustainable and Regulatable Functional Materials", aims to discover and deploy new polymeric materials with highly reactive crosslinker molecules forming reversible covalent bonds between chains, imparting self-healing, reconfiguration, and recycling capabilities. The approach consists of combining simulation-based and data-driven design of crosslinker architectures with a revised viscoelasticity theory to predict the responsiveness of CAN systems to thermal, mechanical, and photonic stimuli.

Synthesis, characterization, and analysis of application-specific performance criteria for the most promising designs will result in new fundamental understanding that enables the development of rapidly recyclable plastics, recurrently self-healing structural composites, new additive manufacturing routes, self-triggered mechanical metamaterials, and functional materials whose properties can be regulated on demand.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.