No Arabic abstract
Crystal structure determines properties of materials. With the crystal structure of a chemical substance, many physical and chemical properties can be predicted by first-principles calculations or machine learning models. Since it is relatively easy to generate a hypothetical chemically valid formula, crystal structure prediction becomes an important method for discovering new materials. In our previous work, we proposed a contact map-based crystal structure prediction method, which uses global optimization algorithms such as genetic algorithms to maximize the match between the contact map of the predicted structure and the contact map of the real crystal structure to search for the coordinates at the Wyckoff Positions(WP). However, when predicting the crystal structure with high symmetry, we found that the global optimization algorithm has difficulty to find an effective combination of WPs that satisfies the chemical formula, which is mainly caused by the inconsistency between the dimensionality of the contact map of the predicted crystal structure and the dimensionality of the contact map of the target crystal structure. This makes it challenging to predict the crystal structures of high-symmetry crystals. In order to solve this problem, here we propose to use PyXtal to generate and filter random crystal structures with given symmetry constraints based on the information such as chemical formulas and space groups. With contact map as the optimization goal, we use differential evolution algorithms to search for non-special coordinates at the Wyckoff positions to realize the structure prediction of high-symmetry crystal materials. Our experimental results show that our proposed algorithm CMCrystalHS can effectively solve the problem of inconsistent contact map dimensions and predict the crystal structures with high symmetry.
Geometric information such as the space groups and crystal systems plays an important role in the properties of crystal materials. Prediction of crystal system and space group thus has wide applications in crystal material property estimation and structure prediction. Previous works on experimental X-ray diffraction (XRD) and density functional theory (DFT) based structure determination methods achieved outstanding performance, but they are not applicable for large-scale screening of materials compositions. There are also machine learning models using Magpie descriptors for composition based material space group determination, but their prediction accuracy only ranges between 0.638 and 0.907 in different kinds of crystals. Herein, we report an improved machine learning model for predicting the crystal system and space group of materials using only the formula information. Benchmark study on a dataset downloaded from Materials Project Database shows that our random forest models based on our new descriptor set, achieve significant performance improvements compared with previous work with accuracy scores ranging between 0.712 and 0.961 in terms of space group classification. Our model also shows large performance improvement for crystal system prediction. Trained models and source code are freely available at url{https://github.com/Yuxinya/SG_predict}
Lattice constants such as unit cell edge lengths and plane angles are important parameters of the periodic structures of crystal materials. Predicting crystal lattice constants has wide applications in crystal structure prediction and materials property prediction. Previous work has used machine learning models such as neural networks and support vector machines combined with composition features for lattice constant prediction and has achieved a maximum performance for cubic structures with an average $R^2$ of 0.82. Other models tailored for special materials family of a fixed form such as ABX3 perovskites can achieve much higher performance due to the homogeneity of the structures. However, these models trained with small datasets are usually not applicable to generic lattice parameter prediction of materials with diverse compositions. Herein, we report MLatticeABC, a random forest machine learning model with a new descriptor set for lattice unit cell edge length ($a,b,c$) prediction which achieves an R2 score of 0.979 for lattice parameter $a$ of cubic crystals and significant performance improvement for other crystal systems as well. Source code and trained models can be freely accessed at https://github.com/usccolumbia/MLatticeABC
Based on the unbiased structure prediction, we showed that the stable form of NiSi compound under the pressure of 100 and 200 GPa is the Pmmn-structure. Furthermore, we discovered a new stable phase - the deformed tetragonal CsCl-type structure with a = 2.174 {AA} and c = 2.69 {AA} at 400 GPa. Specifically, the sequence of high-pressure phase transitions is the following: the Pmmn-structure - below 213 GPa, the tetragonal CsCl-type - in the range 213-522 GPa, and cubic CsCl - higher than 522 GPa. As the CsCl-type structure is considered as the model structure of FeSi compound at the conditions of the Earths core, this result implies restrictions on the Fe-Ni isomorphic miscibility in FeSi.
Prediction of stable crystal structures at given pressure-temperature conditions, based only on the knowledge of the chemical composition, is a central problem of condensed matter physics. This extremely challenging problem is often termed crystal structure prediction problem, and recently developed evolutionary algorithm USPEX (Universal Structure Predictor: Evolutionary Xtallography) made an important progress in solving it, enabling efficient and reliable prediction of structures with up to ~40 atoms in the unit cell using ab initio methods. Here we review this methodology, as well as recent progress in analyzing energy landscape of solids (which also helps to analyze results of USPEX runs). We show several recent applications - (1) prediction of new high-pressure phases of CaCO3, (2) search for the structure of the polymeric phase of CO2 (phase V), (3) high-pressure phases of oxygen, (4) exploration of possible stable compounds in the Xe-C system at high pressures, (5) exotic high-pressure phases of elements boron and sodium.
Crystal structure prediction is now playing an increasingly important role in discovery of new materials. Global optimization methods such as genetic algorithms (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) have been combined with first principle free energy calculations to predict crystal structures given composition or only a chemical system. While these approaches can exploit certain crystal patterns such as symmetry and periodicity in their search process, they usually do not exploit the large amount of implicit rules and constraints of atom configurations embodied in the large number of known crystal structures. They currently can only handle crystal structure prediction of relatively small systems. Inspired by the knowledge-rich protein structure prediction approach, herein we explore whether known geometric constraints such as the atomic contact map of a target crystal material can help predict its structure given its space group information. We propose a global optimization based algorithm, CMCrystal, for crystal structure reconstruction based on atomic contact maps. Based on extensive experiments using six global optimization algorithms, we show that it is viable to reconstruct the crystal structure given the atomic contact map for some crystal materials but more constraints are needed for other target materials to achieve successful reconstruction. This implies that atomic interaction information learned from existing materials can be used to improve crystal structure prediction.