I have been always fascinated by science
and math and in retrospect if I think
through this it is that once you get the
loss of physics and biology right the
rest is left to your imagination and you
can actually practically do something
with it so today I am going to talk
about materials and inverse design the
two ideas which I think are going to
change the world so starting with one
atom at a time so we will go back to the
past and look at the periodic table you
would have studied in your chemistry
class which is essentially
classification of elements that are
known to man in groups essentially based
on their atomic configuration the
materials themselves are collections of
these atoms so you essentially have
properties which come with many of these
atoms together
now if you were to look into the
computer industry so following up on the
next talk the previous talk the 1980s
essentially used about a dozen elements
from the periodic table these were
essentially used more widely than others
but if you fast forward to today
we are essentially looking at so many of
these elements today for the technology
this is about 60 in number and as you
can see that we are looking at anything
that is not toxic our radioactive or so
now at this particular point I would
like to talk a little about the design
design 1.0 which you may know as natural
evolution and let me walk you through
that what nature does is it starts with
a base design and then essentially try
try out different patterns and
combinations and see which ones stick
and bypasses those which don't stick and
that essentially is the way the design
goes forward without any intent that we
could see so to illustrate this I have
taken something from christian database
work and what is shown here is our amino
since essentially 27 of them which are
part of the protein that converts sugar
into alcohol and this is shown for wheat
now if you take 16 of these amino acids
and essentially try to modify them as
the nature has you will essentially end
up with a fruit fly so the fruit flies
has essentially 16 of these amino acids
changed from weed now if you take the
fruit flies amino acid sequence and they
get 14 of them get modified you
essentially end up with the human you
can see there are two flip sites to this
design first as there is no Intendant
site so it could be an optimal outcome
or non optimal outcome then the second
thing is it took a billion years to do
this right so since we don't have that
much time at work we actually go to
design 2.0 which is an inverse design
and we go back to nature now design 2.0
is something that is done in nature
routinely specifically the three-pound
organ that we all have in our head
called brain let me let's rate that with
an example let us say you tasted an
exotic dish somewhere and you liked the
flavor and the order of the taste and
you want to get it into your pasta sauce
so you essentially know roughly what the
ingredients are and you would like to
try out those ingredients to see whether
you end up with the taste so you had an
end in sight and you were trying out
something else differently and that is
the concept in in its simplest form but
that is what we essentially use for
materials design so we start with
properties that we would like to have
and then look using computers as to what
type of structures could give those
properties and what atoms would you need
to put together to get these structures
so this is the concept of inverse design
at this point most of your thinking okay
there are 70 or 60 elements and there
are known properties it should be a
simple straightforward thing but it's
not I am showing you by these four
charts why it is not if you look at the
number of elements that one could use
it's about 60 to 70
if you try to alloy them or try to mix
them up into compounds you essentially
end up with over 100,000 now if you take
two of these materials and try to create
a junction then you are essentially in
the billions and if you try to put four
of these two for a structure then you
end up in trillions so what started off
as a few elements now you are stuck with
about over a trillion combinations of
possibilities there are many ways to
address it so what I am going to show
today are essentially two examples from
that our teams have followed the first
one is it essentially started out with
48 starting structures a simple example
that was done by one of our
collaboration teams then using
principles from chemistry geometry and
statistics you could do a fast search
and essentially end up with seven
probable candidates and once you get
these seven probable candidates you
essentially rank them according to some
metric and then do a deep dive on two of
them so essentially this is doable in
some form now if you ask any senior
researcher they would say this is
something which is a very hard problem I
hope you would agree but what if I told
you that this was done by for students
who are barely out of their teens from
four different universities with four
different backgrounds and when we told
them that they can't do their Twitter or
Facebook they did it in three months
seriously I think the reason they did it
was they were tariff raising one of
Intel's founders Robert Noyce they were
not encumbered by the knowledge that
this problem is supposed to be hard and
that is something to do about your
thinking it is our actually in the
thinking of how this is done now I am
going to show you a second example which
is starting with the base material this
has two kinds of atoms and this is a
real material and what you're seeing is
essentially how this material was
essentially built and we had a set of
target properties in mind that we wanted
to go after and
so in order to engineer the material we
start with that and then we pluck out
the old material and put new materials
in which we think should have the
properties and as you can see it is
essentially filling it up but not
totally filling it up because the
property essentially what we need is not
that dense but it also needs to keep the
integrity of the mechanical structure
and that is an important thing for this
material now if you were to look inside
you will see that the new material which
is a hybrid of the old and the new
essentially has all the atoms and you
see some of the holes in the material
and this was essentially created on the
computer and if you now look at the
properties of this material we started
off with a target on mechanical and
optical property and you see where we
ended up with essentially we ended up
quite close to it so this is not bad so
this essentially shows the viability of
this technique as it could be used and
it is actually being used in one form or
other in our 14 and 10 nanometer
technologies and so on now where are we
going to go with this so this is about
future and progress this meeting so for
design 3.0 I think I showed you that we
had over a trillion combinations if you
do the math right you will see that
there are over six to seven trillion
combinations of materials you could have
just on the kind of elements that we
could use which means in principle you
could design for every human on the
planet a material form application not
only for every human but also for his or
her pets and so in principle you would
be able to go and do that now after you
design it based on the intent you want
you could assemble them and essentially
this is a structure that was assembled
on the computer and this is a work in
progress and then once this is assembled
this could be synthesized and
manufactured using nanotechnology and 3d
printing and this could possibly be
shipped to your home so just like an app
store you would have a material store in
which you could potentially dial in what
you would need
and you would be able to get the
material that you need and there is the
kind of material that would come up with
this doesn't exist in nature yet but it
will be tailored just for you and at
this point you're wondering why do you
need custom materials well what would
you do with it as you have heard in some
of the talks maybe some of you already
knew it each one of us has a very
distinct genome and in in an ideal case
the drugs we should take should be
tailored for us so all these principles
could be used for essentially custom
drugs it could be used for custom body
parts and custom prosthetics and most
importantly the each of us use the brain
which is uniquely connected for us so
what you could have is a custom
intelligence which essentially is a
computer that understands your needs and
would be able to do it so actually the
future would be about custom in the
sense and it could be there the
possibilities could be enormous