21 New Laser Materials Uncovered in Groundbreaking Global Study

Six research teams from five global laboratories significantly shortened the materials discovery timeline from years to just a few months using self-driving labs.
Organic solid-state lasers (OSLs) offer significant potential for various applications thanks to their flexibility, color adjustability, and high efficiency. Nevertheless, they are challenging to produce. With the need for potentially over 150,000 experiments to identify viable new materials, fully exploring this space could take many lifetimes. In fact, in the previous few decades, only 10-20 new OSL materials have been tested.

Researchers with the Acceleration Consortium based at the University of Toronto, took up this challenge and used self-driving lab (SDL) technology that, once set up, enabled them to synthesize and test over 1000 potential OSL materials and discover at least 21 top performing OSL gain candidates in a matter of months.