Rethinking How Materials Are Made

A smartphone screen has two frequently incompatible jobs: it needs to be transparent to let light through so the user can see the display and it needs to conduct electricity so the user can control it via touch.

Transparent materials are common, as are conductive ones. But few substances are both – and a limited number are suitable for consumer electronics.

“Things that conduct electricity well tend to be shiny and reflective,” says Michael Helander, the president and CEO of OTI Lumionics, a Toronto-based company that develops materials for consumer electronics manufacturing. “Transparent materials tend to be good insulators. They don’t conduct electricity. So, how do we make materials that do both? That’s very difficult.”

The solution is highly relevant today: Materials that are both transparent and conductive are essential to devices such as smartphones, laptops and solar cells. Advances in this area could open the door to seamless, edge-to-edge displays with no visual interruptions. “The ability to integrate cameras and sensors behind displays will unlock better user experience, like being able to look each other in the eyes during a video call,” Helander says.

OTI Lumionics helps develop materials for cleaner-burning hydrogen fuel cells, longer-lasting batteries, and industrial chemicals and plastics with reduced toxic byproducts.

Designing such materials requires sophisticated computer simulations that can predict a substance’s properties before it’s ever manufactured in the lab. Conductivity and transparency are both “quantum properties,” governed by the behaviour of electrons, photons and other subatomic particles – and simulating them has historically required impractical amounts of computing power. While quantum computers could eventually make this easier, the technology isn’t quite ready.

Helander (BASc 2007, PhD 2012), who studied materials science and engineering, has developed a workaround – a quantum-solver simulation system that runs on conventional computers, making simulations faster, cheaper and simpler.

Part of their approach involves vastly narrowing the parameters, focusing only on the quantum interactions relevant to the task at hand.

“Every electron doesn’t infinitely interact with every other electron in a molecule,” Helander explains. “The ones closer together interact more strongly. If you tailor the simulation to a specific subset of problems, it can scale much further.”

That added efficiency could dramatically shorten the timeline for developing new materials. “Historically, it took years or decades to develop new materials and specialty chemicals and get them into production,” he says. “When we increase the pace of innovation in materials science, we help people invent new things faster.”