Science

Boffins at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Labs are working to develop cheap and power efficient LEDs to replace lasers. One day, they let a trio of AI assistants loose in their lab.

Five hours later, the bots had churned through more than 300 tests and uncovered a novel approach for steering LED light that is four times better than methods the researchers developed using their own wetware.

The work, detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications underscores how AI agents are changing the way scientists work.

"We are one of the leading examples of how a self-driving lab could be set up to aid and augment human knowledge," Sandia researcher Prasad Iyer said in a recent blog post.

The experiment builds on a 2023 paper in which Iyer and his team demonstrated a method for steering LED light that has applications in everything from autonomous vehicles to holographic projectors. The trick was finding the right combination of parameters to steer the light in the desired manner, a process researchers expected to take years.