Using distributed self-driving laboratory technology, the University of Toronto Acceleration Consortium has rapidly identified 21 high-quality organic solid-state laser (OSL) materials, marking a significant advance in molecular optoelectronics and paving the way for future materials discoveries. (Artist concept). Credit: SciTechDaily.com
Six research teams from five global laboratories have significantly reduced the timeline for material discovery from years to just a few months using self-driving laboratories.
Organic solid-state lasers (OSLs) offer significant potential for various applications due to their flexibility, color matching and high efficiency. Yet they are a challenge to produce. With the need for potentially more than 150,000 experiments to identify viable new materials, fully exploring this space could take many lifetimes. In fact, only 10 to 20 new OSL materials have been tested in recent decades.
Researchers from the University of Toronto Acceleration Consortium took on this challenge and used self-driving laboratory (SDL) technology. Once set up, they were able to synthesize and test more than 1,000 potential OSL materials and discover at least 21 best-performing materials. OSL will receive candidates within a few months.
An SDL uses advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotic synthesis to streamline the process of identifying new materials – in this case materials with exceptional laser properties. Until now, SDLs have typically been limited to one physical laboratory in one geographic location. This article entitled “Delocalized Asynchronous Closed-Loop Discovery of Organic Laser Emitters” published in the journal Science, shows how the research team used the concept of distributed experimentation, where tasks are distributed across different research sites, to reach the shared goal faster. This research involved laboratories from Toronto and Vancouver in Canada, Glasgow in Scotland, Illinois in the US and Fukuoka in Japan.
Benefits of distributed experimentation
Using this method allowed each laboratory to bring its unique expertise and resources, which ultimately played a key role in the success of this project. This decentralized workflow, managed by a cloud-based platform, not only improved efficiency, but also enabled the rapid replication of experimental findings, ultimately democratizing the discovery process and accelerating the development of next-generation laser technology.
“What this paper shows is that a closed-loop approach can be delocalized, that researchers can go all the way from the molecular state to devices, and that you can accelerate the discovery of materials that are very early in the commercialization process,” says Dr. Alán Aspuru-Guzik, director of the Acceleration Consortium. “The team designed an experiment that went all the way from molecule to device, with the final devices made in Japan. They were scaled up in Vancouver and then transferred to Japan for characterization.”
The discovery of these new materials represents a significant advance in the field of molecular optoelectronics. It has paved the way for improved performance and functionality in OSL devices and set a precedent for future delocalized discovery campaigns in materials science and self-driving laboratories.
Reference: “Delocalized, asynchronous, closed-loop discovery of organic laser emitters” by Felix Strieth-Kalthoff, Han Hao, Vandana Rathore, Joshua Derasp, Théophile Gaudin, Nicholas H. Angello, Martin Seifrid, Ekaterina Trushina, Mason Guy, Junliang Liu, Xun Tang, Masashi Mamada, Wesley Wang, Tuul Tsagaantojj, Cyrille Lavigne, Robert Pollice, Tony C. Wu, Kazuhiro HOTTA, Leticia Bodo, Shangyu Li, Mohammad Haddadnia, Cherla, Bonałos,-ign Riley J. Hickman, Jenya Vestfrid, Andrés Aguilar-Granda, Elena L. Klimareva, Ralph C. Sigerson, Wenduan Hou, Daniel Gahler, Slawomir Lach, Adrian Warzybok, Oleg Borodin, Simon Rohrbach, Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling, Chihaya Adachi, Bartosz A. Grzybowski, Leroy Cronin, Jason E. Hein, Martin D. Burke and Alán Aspuru-Guzik, May 17, 2024, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.adk9227