Heiko B. Weber
Heiko B. Weber
Experimental Research Data in Materials Science and Solid-State Physics: Challenges, Strategies and Solutions
Prof. Dr. Heiko B. Weber has received his doctoral degree in physics from Karlsruhe University, Germany. He was awarded with the Erwin-Schrödinger award. Since 2004, he directs the Chair for Applied Physics at Erlangen University, Germany. He has a broad scientific portfolio in experimental solid-state physics, molecular materials and light-matter interactions. He is co-spokesperson of the FAIRmat consortium and speaker for its research area “Experiments”. He has published more than 150 papers in reputed journals.
Heiko B. Weber
Chair for Applied Physics, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
The FAIRmat Consortium, Germany
EXTENDED ABSTRACT: FAIRmat is the german consortium dedicated to establish a FAIR data infrastructure for condensed matter physics. Its central tool is the NOMAD hub [1]. Having started as a repository for computational materials-science data, NOMAD’s functionality has been significantly expanded. Not only has its computational support been extended to excited-state calculations from many-body theories, and classical molecular-dynamics simulations, it has also become a platform for various experimental data. These advances have been achieved through FAIRmat´s development of data models and tools to process and describe the plethora of heterogeneous data available in materials science. Today, NOMAD contains 13 million entries from all over the world, representing more than 3 million materials.
In my talk, I will emphasize on experimental data. Designing an RDM strategy for our heterogeneous community has a double target: (i) the data should be of high quality, i.e. strongly structured, meta-data rich and harmonized, in order to pave the way for novel data-driven research, (ii) for a broad acceptance within the community, an efficient workflow for the individual groups is key. Here, FAIRmat provides various strands [2]. One may start a new experiment with the configurable open-source software NOMAD CAMELS [3]. It provides a simple yet fast solution for instrument control and creating new experimental protocols. Moreover, it provides metadata-rich and well-structured research data output. Well-established experiments have often non-standardized data output. These data may be mapped onto a joint, harmonized description schema for experimental data. Here, we support the NeXus data format that we extensively extended. Tools have been developed that convert individual data formats to NeXus standardized data. Data can be fed into NOMAD Oasis, a local copy of NOMAD that can be tailored to serve the specific needs of individual labs. These data may be kept unpublished, but one can work with the data employing the software tools that are available on this platform. A transfer to the NOMAD portal is then straightforward [1], which provides persistent storage for research data, and one can work with the entity of open access data.
REFERENCES
[1] M. Scheidgen, S. Brückner, S. Brockhauser, L. M. Ghiringhelli, F. Dietrich, A. E. Mansour, J. A. Márquez, M. Albrecht, H. B. Weber, S. Botti, M. Aeschlimann, and C. Draxl, Proceedings of the Conference on Research Data Infrastructure 1 (2023), DOI:10.52825/cordi.v1i.376.
[2] H. B. Weber, S. Brockhauser, C. T. Koch, L. Rettig, M. Aeschlimann, W. Hetaba, M. Grundmann, M. Kühbach, and M. Krieger, Proceedings of the Conference on Research Data Infrastructure 1 (2023), DOI:10.52825/CoRDI.v1i.283.
[3] A. D. Fuchs, J. A. F. Lehmeyer, H. Junkes, H. B. Weber, and M. Krieger, Journal of Open Source Software 9 (2024), DOI:10.21105/joss.06371.