Quantum Materials Discovery by Combining Chemical and Physical Design Principles

Exploratory quantum materials discovery remains crucial to progress in material science. Due to the grand challenges that we are facing in predicting these materials and their properties from scratch, chemical design principles remain a key ingredient for the discovery of new materials. Chemical heuristics, structure, bonding, as well as global and local symmetries are at the very foundation of materials properties. In this regard, in this research, we aim to identify functional materials by composition-structure-property understanding. Materials discovery consists of a subset of methods and design principles that go hand in hand until a desired material or property is realized. However, materials synthesis is still far from a rational design approach. Rather, materials, and especially metastable materials, have to be accessed and synthesized in an exploratory, laboratory-intensive fashion. At the same time, quantum materials discovery is a vibrant highly active field of research that has seen various leaps of progress in recent years, and that holds the promise for many more in the coming years. Here, we lay out how we are discovering new materials and new materials physics in our and other chemical physics, or physical chemistry research groups, and how chemistry and chemical synthesis play a crucial role in this process.