Vision

Materials are crucial to scientific and technological advances and industrial competitiveness, and to tackle key societal challenges — from energy and environment to health care, information and communications, manufacturing, safety, and transportation. Materials enable the technologies that power our economy and sustain our society.

The Swiss National Center for Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials, created in 2014 for an initial period of 12 years, and from 2021 permanently based at PSI in the Center for Scientific Computing, Theory and Data, develops and applies the computational platform needed to understand, predict, design, and discover novel materials, leveraging the great acceleration compared to physical experiments in digital and quantum computing and in artificial intelligence. Breakthrough applications are sought in energy (harvesting, storage, and conversion), in environmental protection and reparation, in information-and-communication technologies, in fundamental and experimental science, and in high-tech and high-value industries that support Swiss society.