Solution-Phase Design of Emerging Nanomaterials

Emerging materials such as liquid metals, intermetallics, phase-change materials, and glassy chalcogenides provide unconventional properties to drive innovations in catalysis, biomedicine, photonics, and data processing. However, the same unique characteristics that enable these functionalities, such as dynamic surfaces, complex bonding, or amorphous structures, simultaneously present significant challenges in controlling their synthesis and tailoring them for specific applications. Solution-phase assembly of these materials from nanoscale building blocks offers a powerful avenue to overcome these barriers. This approach provides unprecedented nanoscale control and high flexibility to adjust composition, geometry, and surface, while also enabling advanced patterning technologies and providing compatibility with various substrates. This perspective highlights the transformative potential of solution-phase synthesis for the development of next-generation functional materials. More broadly, we showcase the avenue toward precise design of materials as well as accelerated materials discovery and optimization, particularly when integrated with modern machine learning-based algorithms. This has far-reaching implications, complementing and even replacing conventional fabrication methods as well as high-throughput materials screening and optimization.