Even in our digital world, materials still matter

These days, our lives revolve around the digital world. Money, culture, news, gossip – all of it lives there. Generative artificial intelligence is the biggest story in the world, but could you point to where that technology is physically located? The material world just isn’t where the action is.

And yet, despite appearances, we still live in a material world. We need steel for building, lithium and cobalt for batteries, and (despite our best efforts) oil to power our vehicles. Materials might not be sexy, but they still undergird our way of life and shape world events.

We may now be on the cusp of something radical: a completely new way to understand materials. History teaches us that the consequences could be huge. The last time we had such a groundbreaking idea in materials science, it was the late 1920s, with discoveries about the way electrons occupy particular energy levels – or bands – and the gaps between them. This presaged the development of the transistor, the basic unit of all computer hardware, including the chips that power modern AI.

But researchers have long suspected that the innards of materials contain more than those simple energy bands. They may also have a subtle, undulating quantum topography that could determine their properties. And as we report in our cover feature (see “We’ve glimpsed the secret quantum landscape inside all matter”), we are now charting this quantum landscape for the first time.

This deeper exploration could lead to discoveries as revolutionary as the transistor. One hope, for example, is a material that conducts electricity with zero resistance at room temperature.

Finding one of these superconductors would mean we could transmit electricity with no loss in power, a serious boon to green energy and our fight against climate change, among other things.

Even better, this probing could lead us to some new kind of material that we haven’t foreseen at all. Far from retreating from the material world, we might be on the brink of expanding its horizons.