Hunting for new quaternary Zintl phases of the 1:1:1:4 stoichiometry

There is a large group of less well-known solids that share properties with the ionic solids as much as with the covalent solids: Zintl phases. Scientists have reasons to expect interesting and useful materials among the Zintl phases built from four (or more) elements – the quaternary Zintl phases (QZP). The 50 true QZP that are experimentally known are negligible compared to the hundreds of thousands of QZP that might potentially exist. The major bottleneck is that there are so many possibilities to examine. The goal of this project is to boost the discovery rate of QZP by searching through this huge space in the computer rather than in the lab, such that future experiments can concentrate on the most promising cases.