Where matter could go next

A robot arm weighs the powders, a furnace cooks them, an instrument reads what formed, and software chooses the next recipe while the town sleeps. The loop of propose, cook and test runs nights, weekends and public holidays. One such line in California reported 41 new compounds, blends of elements locked into new solids, across 17 days of continuous running.

Nearly every metal object you own is one main metal with a pinch of helpers: steel is iron with a whisper of carbon. High-entropy alloys turn that recipe upside down. Five or more metals blend in roughly equal shares, like a fruitcake where every slice holds the same mix. Some blends grow stronger, not weaker, in deep cold: one chromium, cobalt and nickel mix posted toughness readings, its knack for bending rather than snapping, among the highest on record, in tests at about minus 253 degrees Celsius. That is 20 kelvin, the scale that counts up from absolute zero, so twenty degrees above the bottom of the temperature scale.

The battery in your phone ferries charged atoms through a flammable liquid: the electrolyte, the syrup the charge swims through. Solid-state cells swap that liquid for a thin ceramic or plastic that stays put and still lets the charged atoms slide. Small cells work in labs today; the climb is making them by the million, cheaply, in sheets big enough for a car.

The graphite in a pencil is a deck of carbon sheets, each a single atom thick. One sheet on its own is graphene, so thin that about three million of them stack to a millimetre. Lay one sheet on another and turn the top one by about a degree, and the pair behaves like a brand-new material: within a degree or two of absolute zero, where every Celsius reading has bunched up near minus 273 and the count from the bottom of the scale is the one worth reading, one twisted pair carries current with no measurable loss. Choosing the sheets and the angle of the turn is a craft of its own, called twistronics.

A superconductor carries electric current with no measurable loss. Many materials manage it today, but only when chilled colder than any winter on Earth. Squeeze certain hydrogen-rich compounds to more than a million times the push of the air around you, pressures like the deep inside of the planet, and the trick survives up to about minus 23 degrees Celsius (250 kelvin), the chill of a shop ice-cream freezer. The prize would be a wire that does it on a bench: no chill, no squeeze. None is confirmed at everyday pressure so far. Claims of exactly that have appeared, and each has gone onto other benches, where the resistance drop traced back to something else in the sample. Those traces are published, which is why each round of checking runs faster than the last.

A fusion machine holds a working star. Its fuel is plasma, a gas so hot its atoms have come apart, at more than 100 million degrees: over six times the heat at the centre of the Sun. That high up, Celsius and kelvin read the same number, since the 273 between the two scales vanishes into the rounding. Magnetic fields hold the plasma away from the walls, yet the walls still cop the glare plus a hail of neutrons, the uncharged pieces that fly out of the reaction. Tungsten, the metal with the highest melting point at 3,422 degrees Celsius (3,695 kelvin), about three times the heat of fresh lava, lines the hottest parts of today's test machines. Steels that stay sound after years of that hail are still being worked out.

Before anything gets cooked, software that has studied the known crystals can sketch which new recipes would likely hold together. One effort, called GNoME, predicted about 2.2 million new crystals, roughly one for every person in Perth, and flagged about 380,000 of them as likely stable: give each crystal a seat and they would fill the MCG (the Melbourne Cricket Ground, about 100,000 seats) close to four times over. Hundreds from the list have since been made in labs and held together as the predictions said they would.