From the perspective of physics, everything is made of atoms, ions, electrons, etc. Since we know the basic interaction between elementary particles, it might be possible to design customized materials or catalysts. But apparently, the real world is more complicated than just adding different interactions together, in condensed matter physics, it is well known that there are new patterns emerging as scaling up, for example, the quasiparticles and superconductor.
My questions are:
- What is the current view of designing customized materials or catalysts based on elementary laws of physics?
- From the perspective of ab initio calculation, maybe if we have a powerful supercomputer, we could use Numerical analysis to simulate the real material from the elementary law of physics of each atom. Currently, there is some research about using multi-scale modeling, which introduces some approximation at each level, but I don't see any research of designing materials with multi-scale modeling, is it useful on the subject of material design?
- I see a lot of research focusing on building a database of materials and trying to use machine learning techniques to find new patterns. Is this a hopeful way to deal with our dilemma?