Argonne’s Polybot Joins the Self-Driving Lab Club

New materials are urgently needed to make better components used for sustainable energy. Technologies like nuclear fusion and quantum computing need materials that can tolerate high levels of radiation or support quantum computing while being safe, cost-effective, and sustainable. But those materials don’t yet exist, and discovering them is a Herculean task that involves synthesizing and testing large numbers of hypothesized materials.

“The discovered materials are a very tiny fraction of the hypothesized materials—like a droplet of water in an ocean,” wrote MIT professor of nuclear…