Advancing the Pareto front for thin-film materials using a self-driving laboratory

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2106.08899
• Publication Date: 2021-01-01
• Authors: Benjamin P. MacLeod; Fraser G. L. Parlane; Connor C. Rupnow; Kevan E. Dettelbach; Michael Scott Ell...; Thomas D. Morrissey; Ted H. Haley; Oleksii Proskurin; Michael B. Rooney; Nina Taherimakhsousi; David Dvořák; Hsi Nien Chiu; Christopher E. B....; Karry Ocean; Mehrdad Mokhtari; Curtis P. Berling...
• Keywords: Condensed Matter - Materials Science; Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci); FOS: Physical sciences; Physics - Applied Physics; Applied Physics (physics.app-ph); 01 natural sciences; 0104 chemical sciences

Useful materials must satisfy multiple objectives, where the optimization of one objective is often at expense another. The Pareto front reports optimal trade-offs between competing objectives. Here we report a self-driving laboratory, "Ada", that defines conductivities and processing temperatures for palladium films formed by combustion synthesis. Ada identified previously untested synthesis conditions resulted in discovery lower (below 200 {\deg}C) relative to prior art this technique (250 {\deg}C), temperature difference makes coating different commodity plastic possible (e.g., Nafion, polyethersulfone). These enabled us use spray coat uniform with moderate conductivity (1.1 $\times$ 10$^5$ S m$^{-1}$) 191 {\deg}C. Spray 226 {\deg}C yielded (2.0 10$^6$ comparable those sputtered 5.8 m$^{-1}$). This work shows how laboratories can discover satisfying