The objective of the Mendeleev Force project is to classify, tabulate and standardize substances from nanoscale measurements and produce libraries from these tabulations that can be easily searched and accessed by the broader scientific community.
We believe that only by providing easy and fast access via centralized databases, scanning probe microscopy, and more generally the data resulting from nanoscale measurements, can be employed by the scientific community to solve problems related to nanoscale phenomena.
Currently scientists look up the periodic table, the wavelength of a molecule or the thermal conductivity of a material and trust the numbers and the meaning of these numbers. Our long term aim is to produce robust and standardized libraries that can be used in a similar way to identify and look up properties of a material from nanoscale footprints alone.
Background
The Mendeleev’s force spectroscopy project is named after the famous Russian chemist and spectroscopist Dmitri Mendeleev. He famously postulated a version of a periodic table that correctly predicted the properties of otherwise unknown materials and further classified atoms in terms of chemical families. This tabulation has impacted all areas of science to the extent that it has even been described as one of the most powerful icons in science by scientific American[1]. Besides, the tabulation of the atomic elements can be done only once in history element by element and this might have led to its continued relevance even in modern science. The Mendeleev’s force spectroscopy project aims at tabulating materials and more generally substances in a similar fashion by gathering information from nanoscale footprints.
The beginning of the Mendeleev force project
The Mendeleev force project starts with a basic form of nanoscale data acquisition, i.e. atomic force measurements. In this respect, the first library of the project is based on identifying substances from the physical forces that the atoms in materials exert to one another.
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2016/nr/c6nr06094c#!divAbstract
