A search through old materials databases turned up 33 MXenes that researchers had missed—and helped a team make 11 more. At Linköping University in Sweden, artificial intelligence is helping scientists find useful discoveries already buried in the research record, then build on them with a faster, less wasteful way to make the materials.
MXenes are thin materials first discovered in 2011. They are made from a metal combined with carbon or nitrogen, arranged in just a few atomic layers. That structure gives them a very large surface area for their weight. Researchers say MXenes could be useful in areas such as water purification, energy storage, telecommunications and biomedicine, though many possible uses remain unexplored.
The Linköping team worked with colleagues in Estonia and Finland to search materials databases for MXenes that had been made before but were overlooked by researchers in the field. The search identified 33 existing materials. Inspired by those findings, the researchers created 11 new MXenes. The project has been unofficially nicknamed “The Treasure Chest Project.”
“The literature and databases are treasure troves—you just have to open the lid and see what’s there,” said Johanna Rosén, a professor of materials physics at Linköping University. She said researchers can sometimes repeat work without realizing that it was done years earlier. Looking back through existing records, alongside searching for new materials, can help science move faster.
The study also reports a new way to make MXenes. The team produced them in just a few seconds, without external heating, and used significantly less water and fewer hazardous chemicals than previous methods. The researchers say work on MXene production is advancing, and that scaling up manufacturing could help bring the materials into wider use.
MXenes can be stacked in layers. A film just a few millimeters thick may contain several million layers, with chemical reactions taking place between them. Different compositions could give the materials different useful properties. In the new work, the team also showed that rare-earth metals can replace metals in MXenes, making them magnetic. That feature may open paths to applications where magnetism matters, including energy and data storage.
Ali Saffar Shamshirgar, a Linköping researcher and the study’s first author, said finding new compositions gives scientists more ways to explore potential uses, including those linked to sustainability. The results were published in Science in 2026. The next step is to develop manufacturing methods that can be scaled up and to test which applications the newly identified and newly made MXenes can serve. The work offers a practical reminder: progress in materials science can come not only from inventing something new, but also from finding what earlier research left waiting to be noticed.