Skoltech PhD student Vadim Sotskov, Associate Professor Alexander Shapeev of the AI Center, Assistant Professor Alexander Kvashnin of the ESG Center, and their colleagues have tuned the synthesis of a five-element carbide — a strong, hard-melting compound of carbon and five transition metals — which holds much promise for industrial ceramics and catalysis. The team relied on fundamental theoretical principles, simulations, and machine learning to identify conditions for the synthesis of single-phase carbide, in which all metal atoms are evenly distributed throughout the crystal. The predictions were confirmed by an experiment using the advanced energy-efficient vacuumless electric arc synthesis method. A Read more on Naked Science (RUS) and Phys.org (ENG).