Rather than waiting around for serendipity, materials scientists would like to dream up a wonder material and then figure out how to make it. It’s this “inverse” approach to designing materials—working backward from the desired properties—that the team is calling “digital alchemy.”

“It really allows us to focus on the outcome and leverage what we know to find a starting point to building that material,” says Greg van Anders, a corresponding author of the paper and now an assistant professor of physics at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.