The discovery of new optical materials for the next generation of technologies is crucial for economic and societal issues. In particular, such materials are of high importance for the telecommunications, medicine, and low energy consumption lighting. The trial-and-error strategies commonly used to identify new materials are, however, time consuming and repetitive since small modifications in the experimental conditions can have drastic effects on their properties. In this project, a new method enabling the accelerated discovery of optical materials using artificial intelligence (AI) will be initiated and developed. High-throughput (HT) decision-making approach using a multi-agent framework will enable to propose efficiently large sets of new syntheses that will be verified by HT experimentation. The feedback (successes / failures) of the decisions will assist the AI in improving its performances. The automatic iteration between decision and experimentation will be expected to run independently of human intervention. The synergy between the collection of experimental data through a robotic platform and its use through a series of data-driven techniques will be initiated by an interdisciplinary team of chemists, spectroscopists, and data scientists. Two chemical systems will be investigated to establish this new methodology: aluminosilicates and hybrid perovskites. For each of these families of compounds, two optical properties that are important in applications ranging from lasers to solid-state lighting will be characterized in HT manner: the photoluminescence and the second harmonic generation. The objective will be to develop and highlight the efficiency of this new AI methodology by demonstrating its ability to outperform the human strategies.

The project SYNERGY addresses to the hydrogen storage challenge. It promotes the use generalization of dry plasma processes to achieve in-situ both the functionalization and the hybridization by metal hydrides of the catalyzed MOFs. In these circumstances, the objective is to study conditions of development by cold plasmas of these porous structures in order to get a wide range of functionalized MOFs, at lower cost and ecological. The selected materials will be crucial since they will have to allow the formation of innovative, flexible, safe hybrid materials by integrating ultimately both chimisorption and physisorption properties. The synthesis of these hybrid MOFs will be the result of a detailed parametric study focused on the capabilities to improve the hydrogen evolution reaction.

The fluorine element is used in domains as diverse as medicine, energy, microelectronics and everyday plastic objects. Rare in the natural state, a tremendous number of elegant syntheses of fluorinated organic compounds has been developed by using catalysts to improve both activity and selectivity. Catalyzed fluorination by HF in the gas phase is largely operated at industrial scale, essentially for non-functionalized aliphatic fluorinated compounds prepared from chlorinated precursors by Cl/F exchange. In contrast, this strategy is neither applicable to functionalized aliphatic fluorinated compounds due to the sensitivity of most organic functions towards HF, nor for fluoroaromatics which are essentially produced by 2 liquid phase reactions (Balz-Schiemann and HALEX). However, these reactions, poorly selective, generate large volumes of non-recoverable effluents. Therefore, new selective fluorination methods are needed, ideally more efficient, selective and environmentally sustainable. Such an alternative approach, already successfully used for non-functionalized aliphatic fluorinated molecules, is the one-step fluorination of chlorinated aromatic molecules via a gas phase process based Cl/F exchange under anhydrous HF involving catalysts. Additionally, no solvent is required and HCl is the only by-product which is recoverable. Recently, nanofluorides were used as efficient catalysts for the fluorination of 2-chloropyridine. While the selectivity of this reaction is optimal, the activity, related to the weak strength of Lewis acidity of active sites, could be enhanced by increasing the catalyst surface area. Indeed, under harsh conditions (HF gas at 350°C), the nanofluoride catalysts undergo a sintering process leading to a drastic loss of the initially promising surface areas. This stumbling block forces us to explore innovative directions in order to develop such materials, fulfilling the 3 key requirements of a catalyst: activity related to its specific area, selectivity and stability under extreme operating conditions. The innovation of the OPIFCat project is to prepare inorganic fluorinated metallic materials as efficient, selective and stable catalysts under the harsh fluorination conditions of chlorinated reagents under HF gas. In this context, we will explore new architectures and innovative production methods focused on ordered porous inorganic fluorides (OPIFs) supposed to resist such conditions and whose design methodology will be soon patented by the team of IMMM. The chemical composition of the OPIF catalysts will be guided by computer modelling of reaction site chemistry. We will target new Cl/F exchange reactions involving nucleophilic aliphatic and aromatic substitution with five molecules which are involved in domains of energy, agrochemistry and medicine. This project aims to understand the catalyst structure-activity relationship and to establish a “catalyst library” with various strength of Lewis acidity which will help chemists to rapidly select the most appropriate catalyst for the Cl/F exchange as a function of the reactant characteristics (aliphatic/aromatic, activated or not, bearing one or several heteroatoms,…). This OPIFCat project relies on a transdisciplinary consortium with complementary skills, and involves a large industrial group proactive in the sustainable energy transition. It is composed of highly qualified scientists with expertise in the elaboration of fluorinated and polymer materials (IMMM) as well as heterogeneous catalysis (IC2MP), and is completed by an expert of modelling interaction of nanomaterials with reactive species (IMN). Solvay will ensure the scale-up of the OPIF materials and their catalytic properties will be validated in a continuous tubular reactor.

In the context of spintronics and its applications, manipulating the magnetization at fast rates is a major goal. The SPOTZ project aims to unveil the (sub)picosecond dynamics of the magnetization induced by ultrashort current pulses, and in particular, by spin-orbit torques. Next, magnetization switching will be attempted by using ultrashort current pulses and the magneto-resistance will be studied in the THz regime in order to ultimately demonstrate a fully electrical and ultrafast nano-sized magnetic memory.

The TESLA project aims at the development of an ultra-sensitive (nT range), wireless and batteryless magnetic sensor based on Lamb waves for biomedical applications. The passive feature and the remote interrogation of the device will allow a continuous monitoring of the magnetic field and a comfortable use for the patients during heavy medical examinations. Indeed, there is a growing interest in very sensitive magnetic sensors and most importantly in healthcare institutions to conduct high quality medical analysis and to promote early diagnosis. This project has two main steps: the first one will be a proof of concept where the device will be realized with a thinned piezoelectric substrate bonded on the backside to a magnetostrictive thin film while the second one will allow to reach the targeted performance (magnetic sensitivity and acoustic) thanks to a stack of thin layers.