In a September 2020 essay in Nature Energy, three scientists posed several “grand challenges” — one of which was to find suitable materials for thermal energy storage devices that could be used in concert with solar energy systems. Fortuitously, Mingda Li — the Norman C. Rasmussen Assistant Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, who heads the department’s Quantum Matter Group — was already thinking along similar lines. In fact, Li and nine collaborators (from MIT, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Argonne National Laboratory) were developing a new methodology, involving a…
