BY SILVIA CERNEA CLARK

How many materials in your smartphone can you name? For most of us, the answer reveals a curious gap. We’re surrounded by technology but rarely pause to consider the elementals making it possible. This blind spot is a testament to modern materials’ success — they’re so embedded in our daily lives they’ve become invisible. But as Lane Martin, director of the Rice Advanced Materials Institute (RAMI), argues, it’s now time to refocus on them.

“Materials are more often understood as the passive substrate of technology, rather than technology itself,” Martin said. “But if we glance back in time, we find that materials define whole eras of human history — a reminder of just how critical a role they serve in shaping civilization. I think we now live in the era of smart, responsive materials.”

At Rice, materials research has a long and storied legacy. In 1985, Richard Smalley and Robert Curl used lasers to vaporize graphite, giving rise to a form of carbon known as buckminsterfullerenes, or buckyballs — a feat that earned them the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1996. This discovery is telling of a strong and diverse research community and a culture of innovation and collaboration that continues to this day. RAMI builds on this legacy and seeks to bring together the talent and infrastructure that will shape the future of the field while continuing to make history.

“To address the big societal challenges of our time, we need real innovation in materials,” Martin said. “That’s what RAMI is here to do.”

The world is facing a generational opportunity to rethink how we power, connect and sustain society. From next-generation microelectronics that are frugal in their power consumption to materials that clean pollutants from air and water, RAMI aims to meet these pressing challenges, unlocking new capabilities by arranging atoms in ways science has never done before.

It’s all in alignment with Rice’s larger strategy to build sustainable futures — particularly crucial for coastal cities like Houston — and part of the university’s broader momentum as Rice embarks on its 10-year strategic plan. RAMI’s mission centers on three major research areas: materials innovations for energy systems and efficiency; next-generation electronics and photonics; and environmental stewardship.

Energy Systems and Efficiency

The dominant paradigm for energy is shifting away from fossil fuels toward a more heterogeneous landscape. In a diversified energy future, the need for materials that can capture, convert, store and transport energy will continue to grow.

“Some estimates suggest that within the next decade or two, the demand for battery power could be 120 times higher than it is today,” Martin said, adding that storage does not have to just mean batteries.

“There are other ways to store energy — as heat, or in a chemical form, or in electrostatic form, as electrons in a device,” he said. “We also want to invest in ways to convert energy from one form to another, and really just drive up the efficiency of the whole spectrum of the energy resources. We want to make sure we get all we can from each unit of energy we produce.”

Efficiency also means recovering wasted energy. Martin cites projections on materials that can convert heat into usable electricity, conjuring images of “power beaming” — transmitting energy via laser to hard-to-reach devices or even charging your phone’s battery with body heat.

“It might sound like science fiction, but with the right materials, it is achievable,” Martin said.

Next-Generation Electronics and Photonics

Computing is a critical factor for the future of energy. “If we don’t change how we do computation, some projections show that within a decade, computing could consume as much as 30% of the world’s energy production,” Martin said.

This unsustainable trend demands radical innovation. RAMI aims to invent materials that drive down power consumption, voltages and costs, enabling faster, energy-efficient electronics.
“When you look at just how much our experience with technology has changed in the past two decades alone, this progress would not have been possible without large-scale, atomic-level control over materials synthesis,” Martin said.

To make semiconductors, manufacturers have to create pristine versions of materials like silicon, and the devices that do the computation can now be as small as just a few nanometers across. The placement of even one or two atoms in those volumes can change how the device functions. Current technology based on complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS) is running up against limitations inherent in their very atomic structure.

“Going beyond CMOS means designing new material systems that operate on a whole different paradigm and enable us to do our computation faster, with less energy use, and to do it in interesting ways that maybe gives us multifunctionality, such as storing data in the very devices doing the computation,” Martin said.

Environmental Stewardship

“In the past, we didn’t design materials with their second or third life in mind,” Martin said. RAMI researchers are now developing systems for recycling, upcycling and replacing rare or toxic materials with materials that capture pollutants, reduce carbon emissions and even transform carbon dioxide into new (and useful) products, reflective of a global reckoning with the lifecycle of materials.

“We’re thinking about clean air, water and soil for future generations,” Martin said. “RAMI is keenly interested in figuring out how to design advanced materials and systems that harness a wide range of phenomena in our environment and energy sources therein to steer history onto more sustainable paths.”

Rice is home to world-class labs that probe the very limits of matter in extreme forms like ultracold plasmas, or grown, atom by atom, into layers with precise and intricate geometries. It also happens to be one of the critical sites for the birth of supercomputing as well as a contemporary hub of critical expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and computer science and engineering. This gives RAMI an edge, as applying modern lessons from AI and ML to materials will have a transformative impact. From accelerating the discovery and design of new materials to processing the staggeringly large datasets generated by modern experiments, such approaches will increasingly enable researchers to fine-tune their efforts and access insights with greater ease.

“A single graduate student at a synchrotron can generate an excess of 30 terabytes of data in a week,” Martin said, referring to a type of particle accelerator that uses powerful light beams to analyze a wide range of materials, from solar cells to ancient scrolls. “AI can help us squeeze every drop of insight from that data — something no individual can do by themselves.”

To achieve its mission, RAMI is supercharging interdisciplinary research by investing in human and physical capital — hiring new faculty across disciplines, recruiting new postdoctoral fellows and supporting undergraduate research to cultivate the next generation of scientists.

“Materials scientists and computing and AI experts often speak different languages, but when we find common ground, that’s where real innovation happens,” Martin said.

Supported by a gracious gift from the Welch Foundation, RAMI hopes to recruit world-leading researchers keen to work in the vibrant interdisciplinary community at Rice. And RAMI’s collaboration with Rice’s Shared Equipment Authority (SEA) ensures that the university will serve as a world-leading site with the cutting-edge infrastructure to support premier research and teaching.

“RAMI is really honored and lucky to be a resident of one of the newest buildings on campus, the Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering and Science — a beautiful space that really was designed around this concept of interdisciplinary research endeavor,” Martin said. “That speaks to the heart of what RAMI is.”

Materials may not be the first thing to come to mind when thinking of cutting-edge technologies. One might think instead of smart phones, satellites and particle accelerators, or advanced algorithms and catalysis. However, Martin argues it’s time to refocus on materials as a core part of “advanced” technology.

“Smart, responsive materials are not just a part of, but absolutely central to the technologies of the future,” he said.