Collaboration with the Max Planck Society: The Max Planck Society and its institutes have long-standing research partnerships in the field of quantum materials and engage in active collaboration with industry and startups.
Innovative AI platform: Alqem AI's platform combines extensive databases of material predictions with high-quality training data and laboratory synthesis to turn digital predictions into real materials.
Partnership with Alqem AI: Alqem AI is launching a project to identify new magnetic materials that do not contain rare earth elements. The company is receiving support for this subproject from Prof. Claudia Felser, director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids.
Bronze, iron, steel, silicon: Every major technological era has been shaped by new materials. However, only a fraction of the theoretically possible crystalline compounds have ever been synthesized. Hundreds of millions of possibilities thus remain undiscovered. At the same time, the supply of critical raw materials is increasingly falling into the hands of just a few countries. High-performance permanent magnets – which are indispensable for electric vehicles, wind turbines, robotics, and defense systems, among other applications – are produced in China at a rate of about 90 percent. Recent export restrictions have made the supply of materials a key geopolitical issue.
The MPG and its institutes, which are active in the fields of solid-state research and related areas, have long been addressing this key issue and conducting research on so-called quantum materials. There are numerous scientific collaborations and agreements on these topics between the Max Planck Society and other scientific partners. The MPG has also long pursued scientific exchange between Max Planck Institutes and industry or startups. The most recent example is the scientific support provided to Alqem AI, a DEEPTech startup, by the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden in the field of next-generation magnetic materials, led by Claudia Felser , director of the institute and vice president of the Max Planck Society.
Alqem AI, which has just completed a pre-seed round of financing totaling 8 million euros, is pursuing an approach that uses AI to identify suitable materials. The company was founded by the team behind Alexandria, the world’s leading open materials database, which is used by numerous universities and companies in AI-driven materials research. At the core of the AI platform are two proprietary data foundations: a database of predicted materials on an unprecedented scale, as well as high-quality training data for material properties that did not previously exist in this form. In-house laboratory capabilities for synthesis ensure that digital predictions are turned into real materials.
“We’re starting where the need is greatest: with rare-earth-free magnets – a product the world urgently needs, since rare earths have remained irreplaceable for decades. But the AI platform we’re building isn’t limited to a single class of materials,” says Hanh Nguyen , CEO of Alqem AI.
Claudia Felser’s team has been working in the field of synthesizing and characterizing rare-earth-free magnets for quite some time. Claudia Felser is committed to this startup out of conviction: “Discovering a truly new permanent magnet is one of the most difficult problems in materials science. The last real breakthrough was over forty years ago. ”What makes alqem’s approach special is that it doesn’t stop at prediction. In our collaboration, we’re putting precisely those rare-earth-free candidates through experimental testing that researchers have long been waiting for. And it’s the combination of large-scale computer-aided screening and systematic synthesis that convinces me this can work.”
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The research at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids (MPI CPfS) in Dresden, Germany, aims to discover and understand new materials with unusual properties.
In close cooperation, chemists and physicists (including chemists working on synthesis, experimentalists and theoreticians) use the most modern tools and methods to examine how the chemical composition and arrangement of atoms, as well as external forces, affect the magnetic, electronic and chemical properties of the compounds. New quantum materials, physical phenomena and materials for energy conversion are the result of this interdisciplinary collaboration.
The MPI CPfS ( www.cpfs.mpg.de ) is part of the Max Planck Society and was founded in 1995 in Dresden. It is divided into four departments and four independent research groups. The Institute employs around 280 staff, of whom about 180 are scientists including 70 doctoral students from more than 20 nations.
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