This Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) will leverage the momentum and success of our first EFRC and amplify this in an evolved collaborative Center focused on the design, synthesis and kinetic stabilization of revolutionary materials for energy conversion, storage and transport. While most materials are created at or near ambient pressure, high-pressure conditions have tremendous potential for manipulating matter to synthesize next-generation materials with transformative impacts on energy. The core theme of our research center is to synthesize fundamentally new materials and to exploit these for energy science through a focus on understanding kinetically stabilized routes to ambient pressure. EFree II will focus on studying, manipulating and ultimately controlling materials in regimes outside their fields of thermodynamic stability. In this, we will employ new methodological approaches that will allow access to new regions of phase space by treating recoverable high-pressure compounds as precursors for subsequent ambient-pressure manipulation. We will also exploit pressure to mediate kinetically controlled synthesis of new materials in the solid state. Here, alternative reaction pathways are ‘engineered’ by using pressure to control the structure of precursors. In many systems, these pathways need not lead to thermodynamically stable reaction products, but to other new materials that can be stabilized by exploiting the kinetic limits of reaction rates. Finally, we will also use chemical pressure and epitaxial growth to enhance the ambient-pressure stability of materials that exhibit exceptional high-pressure energy transport properties. By design, these approaches are highly synergistic and this will be exploited to forge effective collaboration across the Center using both experiment and theory. The targeted Energy Focus Areas are classified as: (1) Advanced Structural Materials, (2) Novel Energy Conversion Materials and (3) Revolutionary Energy Transport Materials, which form the focus by which the projects will be managed. In its structure, EFree II builds on an established and highly accomplished scientific team through the targeted addition of key new personnel with expertise appropriate for the new scientific goals. With much of the necessary equipment and infrastructure already in place and with strong, established programs at multiple leading DOE facilities, EFree II is well positioned to take the synthesis and recovery of new materials and the discovery of phenomena to the next level with a tightly focused program in energy science, complimented by training of the next generation of scientists and outreach to the broader community.
