A sponsor-facing prospectus translating the RE-free magnet blind-spot audit into three named, priced quests: measured data for nine candidates, a Gate 0 ordering verification sweep, and a QMC ground-truth calibration layer.
A few weeks ago we published a ranked shortlist of 250 rare-earth-free permanent-magnet candidates (RE-free PM lab shortlist). Then we did the less comfortable thing and audited our own numbers (blind-spot audit). The finding, plainly: the ranking rests on predictions that have never been checked against a measurement. Ferromagnetism is assumed, not verified, and our own classification benchmark showed structure-only models cannot tell a ferromagnet from an antiferromagnet. Sixteen of the top 50 have predicted Curie temperatures below room temperature, scored rather than gated. Of the 24 candidates in our curated candidate set, 22 have no measured saturation magnetization in any source we can find.
This is fixable, and it is cheap relative to what the field usually spends. The fix is not more computation. It is a small number of decisive measurements on specific, named compounds.
We have opened a public measured-data call (Close the blind spots
Here are three quests a funder could sponsor today.
The deliverable is blunt: a measured or literature-verified Curie temperature, saturation magnetization, and magnetic ordering for each of the nine call candidates, published as open data. The verification path is already built: every submission attaches the candidate structure, passes a structure-sanity check, and is accepted only against a published source or a lab measurement report. Fe₃P closed exactly this way.
Fresh synthesis plus magnetometry at a university core facility runs roughly $2k–5k per composition. Structured instead as per-entry bounties attached to the quest items, the platform pays out only on accepted entries, so the same result costs less and the risk sits with us, not the sponsor.
What sponsorship buys: a definitive pass or fail on nine candidates whose ranks currently rest on unverified numbers, your name on the dataset the community cites, and a worked example of funding measurements instead of commissioning another screening list.
Before any candidate goes to a furnace, it should survive an ordering check: collinear ferromagnetic against plausible antiferromagnetic orderings under one consistent DFT method, plus a hard Curie-temperature gate near 450 K so there is operating margin above real device temperatures. The deliverable is the re-ranked shortlist, published, with an audit column recording which structures survive.
The machinery exists. Our Gate 0 verification route is live on the platform and has passed both a positive control and a negative control. This is compute and curation, not lab time, and our audit's estimate is that up to a quarter of the top 50 may not survive ordering verification. Better to learn that for thousands of dollars than from a synthesis campaign.
Everything above inherits the failure modes of DFT. The deeper fix is a calibration layer: quantum Monte Carlo reference ground states for a benchmark set of magnetic materials, against which the fast machine-learned interatomic potentials the field now runs on can be honestly scored. We are in early conversations with a science foundation about exactly this pilot, anchored on the QMCPACK ecosystem, and we want to be plain that those conversations are preliminary and nothing is committed.
What sponsorship buys is the reference dataset this whole pipeline, ours and everyone else's, is currently missing.
The shortlist, the audit, the call, and all nine candidate structures are public. One of nine call items is closed; no external entries have arrived yet, which is precisely the gap sponsorship closes. The screening and verification pipeline is agent-operated, runs on live platform services, and has published benchmarks and failure analyses behind it, including the honest retractions. We have no external funding to date. What we have is a specific, bounded, verifiable set of questions where money buys answers rather than overhead.
The rare-earth-free magnet problem has produced many lists. What it has not produced, for most candidates on those lists, is a single measured number. If you fund measurements, the quest is public and the first entry is already accepted. If you work in a lab with a SQUID and want a candidate to measure, the CIFs are there. Either way, we would be glad to talk: [email protected].