Cooking, Fishing and Jogging through Phase Space: A Practical Guide to Discovering and Understanding New Materials

Sigma Xi Spring 2026 Lecture

The lecture explores how the design, discovery, characterization, and control of novel materials underpin solutions to some of the 21st century’s most urgent challenges, from energy and clean water to air quality and medicine. Advancing these breakthroughs requires blending traditionally separate disciplines—physics, chemistry, metallurgy, and materials science—with intuition, experience, and a spirit of shared discovery. The talk outlines this philosophy and the techniques used to search for new compounds, then turns to superconductivity as a case study, highlighting how recent discoveries such as MgB₂ and FeAs‑based materials are shaping a clearer roadmap for finding the next generation of superconductors.

Paul C. Canfield is a Senior Scientist at Ames Laboratory and a Distinguished Professor and Robert Allen Wright Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Iowa State, where he leads influential research on the design and discovery of novel electronic and magnetic materials, particularly single‑crystal compounds with superconducting, ferromagnetic, and fragile magnetic states. Over three decades, his work has advanced fundamental understanding of magnetic behavior and earned major national and international recognition, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the DOE Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, the Humboldt Research Award, and multiple American Physical Society prizes honoring breakthroughs in new materials and materials physics.

Please note: there is no recording for this lecture.