An ARPA-E award to design ultra-strong magnets

We are part of a team that has received an award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), in its MAGNITO program (Magnetic Acceleration Generating New Innovations and Tactical Outcomes), for the project “Motifs to Magnets: Ultra-strong Magnets Through Wyckoff and Lego-like Design”, together with Prashun Gorai at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Boniface Fokwa at the University of California, Riverside.

Permanent magnets drive electric motors and generators, from electric vehicles to wind turbines, and the strongest ones rely on rare-earth elements. MAGNITO seeks permanent magnets stronger than any known material. As its title says, our project will look for them by design: assembling crystal structures from structural motifs, described by the positions their atoms occupy (their Wyckoff positions), like Lego bricks. Piero Canepa and the group will study and discover new strong permanent magnets with multiscale methods.