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Materials change the world. For good reasons we may subdivide the past according to lead materials – we may speak of the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age – and today we live in a time in which materials are more diverse and richer than ever before.Materials are surrounding us everywhere – from the clothes we wear via the bicycles we ride to the tablets and smartphones which connect us to the rest of the world. Some seem elemental or are invisible to our bare eye. However, nearly every object around us contains materials which have been functionalized and optimized for a specific application. These can be natural products like wood, cotton or wool, or traditional materials like steel or cast iron, but also special compound materials in diapers or materials with nanostructured surfaces.

The right choice of materials and their further improvement can be crucial for the success of a technology as a whole. Often completely new materials have to be created. Can we make batteries for electric cars lighter and increase their durability? How do we have to design the layer structure of a solar cell to increase its efficiency? Can we lower the costs for air-conditioning of buildings by invisible and “intelligent” coatings of window fronts? How do we have to design the surface of an implant to prevent the body from rejecting it? Which materials can help us to create sensing robotic surfaces? In all fields of high-tech, like medicine, mobility, communication, energy supply, space flight, and many more, specially designed and optimized materials are indispensable. Therefore, materials science has a high significance in the future, e.g. it is particularly highlighted in the high-tech strategy of the German federal government.

All materials are composed of the chemical elements as the microscopic building blocks of our material world. The function of a material or a compound material is not solely based on the chemical composition, but also on the arrangement of the atoms on the microscopic or mesoscopic length scales, as well as the interplay of its constituents. Even pure Carbon can show quite different properties as black graphite, shining diamond or single-atomic layer graphene. The properties of materials change with size on the nanoscale. The knowledge of these dependencies allows us to develop of new, custom-tailored materials according to a modular system.

On average every human being in our consumer society uses 10 to 30 tons of material goods per year. The population of the world grows exponentially. More than 50 chemical elements are incorporated in a mobile phone, many of them only in tiny amounts, but still indispensable for its full functionality. Serious problems in the supply of certain chemical elements for mass production, e.g., of mobile phones, solar cells or batteries are no utopia anymore. Even at present, it becomes obvious that important elements are not available without difficulty – the research for alternative materials’ concepts is gaining importance. To prevent shortage situations, substitute materials have to be investigated, and materials’ cycles have to be closed. Materials science is in great demand and will play a central role when addressing these issues.

The number of thrilling questions in materials science is as large as the number of the materials itself. Materials scientists are shaping the world around us – today and tomorrow. Are you curious now?

 
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