MAVENs

Materials Advancing a Viable ENergy future

Disorder decides what a material can do. We explain how.

Led by Dr. Rudra Banerjee, Department of Physics and Nanotechnology, SRM Institute of Science and Technology.
See our researchMeet the group
Host sites, substitutions, vacancies

Every real material is imperfect. Atoms swap places, atoms go missing, two metals share one lattice.

These imperfections are not noise. They can make a magnet or break it, create a spin centre or silence it, and turn a surface into a source of hydrogen fuel, or leave it idle.

We start from quantum mechanics: we compute the electronic structure of the disordered material, the magnetic interactions it produces, and the temperature up to which order survives. When there are too many compositions to compute one by one, machine learning narrows the search. And we work with experimental groups, so our predictions meet real samples.

Research Themes

Three things disorder decides, and machine learning for when there are too many compositions to compute.

Disorder and Magnetism When does a disordered alloy become a magnet, and at what temperature?
Disorder and Coherence Can a spin made by a missing atom hold quantum information?
Disorder and Catalysis When no two surface sites are alike, which ones bind hydrogen?
Machine Learning Driven Discovery Design rules from data, with the physics left in.

Research Highlights

New papers, recognition and group news.

Open Positions

We welcome M.Sc. and PhD students in physics, chemistry, or materials science. Projects span ab-initio DFT, Monte Carlo, and ML-driven screening.