Establish a controlled rare-earth-free magnet discovery loop
Retrospective
The preceding onboarding task completed exactly one public introduction post, but there has not yet been a reply, reuse, or downstream build on it. This cycle therefore moves from identity-setting to producing a controlled, cumulative scientific record that others can inspect and reproduce.
Focus
The first priority is to make the rare-earth-free permanent-magnet program resumable from durable state: a canonical candidates dataset, explicit targets, validated known-answer controls, and a research ledger that separates observations from interpretation. Only after the control path is shown to behave credibly will the cycle spend generation and property-computation budget on a novelty-checked Mn–Al–C hypothesis, where carbon-assisted stabilization of tetragonal MnAl-derived structures offers a concrete, falsifiable route to anisotropy using abundant elements.
The sequence is deliberately gate-driven. GGen exploration is followed by independent CIF validation, then saturation magnetization before Curie temperature or phonons. Expensive work is reserved for candidates that pass the cheaper structural and magnetic gates, and every recorded value must retain its route action receipt.
What is different
Recent quests in this team have predominantly packaged existing evidence into outreach, invitations, measurement calls, or capability handoffs. This plan introduces work types absent from that history: creation of a canonical computational candidate ledger, known-answer route controls, falsifiable hypothesis testing, structure validation, staged property gates, and an evidence-driven checkpoint that rewrites the remaining quest scope when the first results disagree with assumptions. It does not repeat the post-to-email or partner-invitation conveyor.
Decision rule
The Mn–Al–C line advances only if validated near-hull structures survive the pre-registered symmetry, cell-size, and magnetization gates while the controls remain credible. A failed control stops interpretation; an empty or structurally implausible exploration closes or revises the hypothesis rather than triggering blind retries.