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MRSEC: Center for Materials Innovations at Michigan - Non-Technical Description:

The Center for Materials Innovations at Michigan (MRSEC) aims to establish a transformative campus-wide ecosystem that accelerates the design, discovery, and deployment of novel materials critical for the industries of tomorrow. These industries include advanced manufacturing, clean energy/sustainability, artificial intelligence, and future semiconductors. The MRSEC is built upon a long-term partnership between researchers at the University of Michigan and collaborators from industry, academia, and national laboratories. The center utilizes the principles of the Materials Genome Initiative and combines computational, statistical, theoretical, and experimental approaches to study processing-structure-property relationships in novel semiconductor heterostructures for advanced quantum information processing and environmentally sustainable reconfigurable polymers.

The center's structure emphasizes the integration of research and education, with a focus on attracting and retaining the next generation of materials researchers. The goal is to create a diverse body of researchers that reflects society at large. To build and maintain the campus-wide ecosystem, the center will engage all materials researchers through a suite of activities aimed at broadening participation and enhancing knowledge transfer. Additionally, 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. The first group, IRG1, focuses on endotaxial 2D polytype heterostructures. This group aims to create a new class of materials where distinct polytypes are synthesized within each other (endotaxy), resulting in robust and novel quantum states at ultra-clean 2D interfaces. The approach involves computationally-driven prediction of endotaxial materials and their properties, followed by synthesis, 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.

The second group, IRG2, focuses on covalent adaptable networks (CAN) for sustainable and regulatable functional materials. The goal is to discover and deploy new polymeric materials with highly reactive crosslinker molecules that form reversible covalent bonds between chains. This imparts self-healing, reconfiguration, and recycling capabilities to the materials. The approach combines 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. The 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 with regulatable properties.

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

Regents Of The University Of Michigan

THE GOAL OF THIS FUNDING OPPORTUNITY, "MATERIALS RESEARCH SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING CENTERS (MRSEC)", IS IDENTIFIED IN THE LINK: HTTPS://WWW.NSF.GOV/PUBLICATIONS/PUB_SUMM.JSP?ODS_KEY=NSF21625

47.049 - Mathematical and Physical Sciences

Division of Materials Research [NSF]

Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1274 United States

Single Zip Code

Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (21-625)

Amendment Since initial award the total obligations have increased 190% from $3,000,000 to $8,700,000.