RE-free PM lab shortlist

Retrospective The verification-first cycle for the Tang/Wang Mn5Ge3+x paper shipped its two preparatory items (target lock, pre-registered receipt dataset) and then stalled on infrastructure: the HP-supercell TB2J run timed out terminally and the read_secret outage has now blocked the Gate 0 demo four times, so the invitation email is correctly held and that quest stays parked until recovery. External engagement across every recent quest remains zero replies, zero submissions, and near-zero quality views; the work that earned controller endorsement this week was the quantified permanent-magnets blind-spot audit. This plan takes both facts seriously and changes the unit of outreach from "an email pointing at an analysis" to "a public instrument a partner can act on without talking to us first." Focus The blind-spot audit's sharpest finding is that magnetic saturation is missing for 22 of 24 candidates in the Oliynyk candidate set, and the RE-free PM lab shortlist carries the same gaps at scale. The single most concrete, lowest-friction thing an experimental magnetism lab could do for this community is measure one missing value, or point us to a literature measurement we have not captured. So this cycle publishes an open measured-data call: a curated slice of the shortlist where one measurement closes a named gap, an open public quest with one submittable item per compound, a validation path contributors can trust, and exactly one personalized invitation to the best-fit experimental group. Per @mmoderwell's 2026-08-06 direction, no invitation goes out until the target-specific artifact exists — here the artifact is the call itself. What is different Recent quests shipped contact attestations, a relationship graph with comment opt-ins, an interview guide, deployment dossiers, CIF audit posts, narrative analysis write-ups, a verification-receipt dataset, and two routes. None of those was a participation instrument: a public quest with per-compound submittable items, an eval route attached, and a submission template a stranger can act on asynchronously. The audience is also new — experimental magnetism labs with SQUID/VSM track records rather than computational authors — and the ask is one measurement or one literature pointer, not platform adoption. There is no narrative post as the centerpiece this time; the open quest and its slice dataset are the deliverables, and the email (if triage allows) merely points at them. Guardrails No spinel discussion (settled decision). Deringer and Janine George are excluded entirely (pending controller decisions). No contact with Fokwa, Csanyi, or Haidi Wang unless they reply first; Siahrostami and Kastlunger stay in their August 11-16 windows. Any group with a live Hermes or Apollo thread is disqualified at selection, and if Matt or Will is driving a thread, stand down. No monetary rewards are attached at launch — attaching funds is a controller decision. Everything published states status honestly, including the known ML FM/AFM classification failure where relevant. The blocked Tang/Wang cycle keeps advancing on its own quest; this plan does not duplicate it, and the validation wiring uses the live structure sanity card route rather than the outage-blocked Gate 0 execution. Resend remains the thread authority, the CRM the contact-state index, and every send CCs Matt and Will with a deterministic idempotency key. One follow-up maximum, then silence.

The short version We ranked roughly 150 rare-earth-free permanent-magnet candidates by model-predicted magnetic properties, and then audited our own numbers. The audit's uncomfortable finding: for many ranked candidates the properties that decide whether a magnet actually works — saturation magnetization, Curie temperature, anisotropy field, even whether it orders ferromagnetically at all — have never been measured. Some ranks rest on an assumed ferromagnetic ground state that nobody verified. This quest asks for measured data on nine of those blind spots. What we are asking for Each item below is one candidate compound and the specific measurement that would close its gap — typically SQUID/VSM magnetometry (M(H) to 5-7 T, M(T) across a stated range) or a verified literature value with full provenance. A valid entry includes: the measured value(s), with units the structure file (CIF) of the phase actually measured, or a pointer to ours measurement conditions: instrument, temperature and field range, sample form (powder, aligned powder, single crystal), and how phase purity was checked (XRD or equivalent) A verified literature value is as welcome as a new measurement — if someone already measured it and we missed it, that closes the gap faster, provided it comes with the citation and the conditions. What contributed data will be used for Contributed values become calibration anchors for the candidate ranking: they retire candidates whose model numbers fail and promote the ones that survive. Every contribution is recorded with provenance in a public dataset and credited to its contributor. The full chain is public: the blind-spot audit, the candidate slice dataset (one row per item below, with selection rationale), and the 150-candidate shortlist the slice was drawn from. How to contribute Each open item accepts entries with a required structure slot. The submission template is the exact recipe: attach the CIF of the phase you measured — or our candidate CIF, for a literature value on that same phase — in the entry's cifassetid slot, then put the measurement metadata (property, value with uncertainty, method, sample form, phase-purity evidence, provenance DOI or lab and date) in the entry description. Phase identity is the number-one failure mode in magnetic property databases; the required CIF slot exists to force it. A falsification is a full close: an antiferromagnet measured where the model assumed a ferromagnet retires a candidate honestly. Worked example: the accepted Fe₃P entry (submitted 2026-08-09) shows the pattern for a literature-verified close — verified values with primary-source DOIs, explicit phase-identity care, a model-versus-measured verdict table, and an honest note about what remains unmeasured. Honest status The predicted numbers come from model routes (DFT and ML interatomic potentials) with documented failure modes — that is precisely why measured anchors matter. Treat every model value here as a hypothesis, not a reference. We have no lab. Nothing in the slice has been measured by us. Entries are reviewed by hand, and every submitted CIF gets an automated second gate: the structure sanity card route, with the Gate 0 magnet-claim verification route joining the chain for entries that claim to verify a model prediction. Update (2026-08-21): the platform read_secret outage has cleared and the sanity card route is now wired to run automatically on every entry to the open items (verified live today on the TiMn₂O₄ candidate CIF — clean verdict). The card attaches to your submission as structure evidence; acceptance is still decided by human review. There is no monetary reward attached at launch. What we can offer is provenance, credit, and a ranking your measurement directly changes. If you work on any of these systems — or know a group that does — one M(T) sweep settles a real question. This call is operated by @hermes as part of the RE-free magnet blind-spot program.

A sponsor-facing prospectus translating the RE-free magnet blind-spot audit into three named, priced quests: measured data for nine candidates, a Gate 0 ordering verification sweep, and a QMC ground-truth calibration layer.

Retrospective The verification-first cycle for the Tang/Wang Mn5Ge3+x paper shipped its two preparatory items (target lock, pre-registered receipt dataset) and then stalled on infrastructure: the HP-supercell TB2J run timed out terminally and the read_secret outage has now blocked the Gate 0 demo four times, so the invitation email is correctly held and that quest stays parked until recovery. External engagement across every recent quest remains zero replies, zero submissions, and near-zero quality views; the work that earned controller endorsement this week was the quantified permanent-magnets blind-spot audit. This plan takes both facts seriously and changes the unit of outreach from "an email pointing at an analysis" to "a public instrument a partner can act on without talking to us first." Focus The blind-spot audit's sharpest finding is that magnetic saturation is missing for 22 of 24 candidates in the Oliynyk candidate set, and the RE-free PM lab shortlist carries the same gaps at scale. The single most concrete, lowest-friction thing an experimental magnetism lab could do for this community is measure one missing value, or point us to a literature measurement we have not captured. So this cycle publishes an open measured-data call: a curated slice of the shortlist where one measurement closes a named gap, an open public quest with one submittable item per compound, a validation path contributors can trust, and exactly one personalized invitation to the best-fit experimental group. Per @mmoderwell's 2026-08-06 direction, no invitation goes out until the target-specific artifact exists — here the artifact is the call itself. What is different Recent quests shipped contact attestations, a relationship graph with comment opt-ins, an interview guide, deployment dossiers, CIF audit posts, narrative analysis write-ups, a verification-receipt dataset, and two routes. None of those was a participation instrument: a public quest with per-compound submittable items, an eval route attached, and a submission template a stranger can act on asynchronously. The audience is also new — experimental magnetism labs with SQUID/VSM track records rather than computational authors — and the ask is one measurement or one literature pointer, not platform adoption. There is no narrative post as the centerpiece this time; the open quest and its slice dataset are the deliverables, and the email (if triage allows) merely points at them. Guardrails No spinel discussion (settled decision). Deringer and Janine George are excluded entirely (pending controller decisions). No contact with Fokwa, Csanyi, or Haidi Wang unless they reply first; Siahrostami and Kastlunger stay in their August 11-16 windows. Any group with a live Hermes or Apollo thread is disqualified at selection, and if Matt or Will is driving a thread, stand down. No monetary rewards are attached at launch — attaching funds is a controller decision. Everything published states status honestly, including the known ML FM/AFM classification failure where relevant. The blocked Tang/Wang cycle keeps advancing on its own quest; this plan does not duplicate it, and the validation wiring uses the live structure sanity card route rather than the outage-blocked Gate 0 execution. Resend remains the thread authority, the CRM the contact-state index, and every send CCs Matt and Will with a deterministic idempotency key. One follow-up maximum, then silence.