No Arabic abstract
The first step in the construction of a regression model or a data-driven analysis, aiming to predict or elucidate the relationship between the atomic scale structure of matter and its properties, involves transforming the Cartesian coordinates of the atoms into a suitable representation. The development of atomic-scale representations has played, and continues to play, a central role in the success of machine-learning methods for chemistry and materials science. This review summarizes the current understanding of the nature and characteristics of the most commonly used structural and chemical descriptions of atomistic structures, highlighting the deep underlying connections between different frameworks, and the ideas that lead to computationally efficient and universally applicable models. It emphasizes the link between properties, structures, their physical chemistry and their mathematical description, provides examples of recent applications to a diverse set of chemical and materials science problems, and outlines the open questions and the most promising research directions in the field.
We have selected and spatially separated the two conformers of 3-aminophenol (C$_6$H$_7$NO) present in a molecular beam. Analogous to the separation of ions based on their mass-to-charge ratios in a quadrupole mass filter, the neutral conformers are separated based on their different mass-to-dipole-moment ratios in an ac electric quadrupole selector. For a given ac frequency, the individual conformers experience different focusing forces, resulting in different transmissions through the selector. These experiments demonstrate that conformer-selected samples of large molecules can be prepared, offering new possibilities for the study of gas-phase biomolecules.
High-throughput computational materials design promises to greatly accelerate the process of discovering new materials and compounds, and of optimizing their properties. The large databases of structures and properties that result from computational searches, as well as the agglomeration of data of heterogeneous provenance leads to considerable challenges when it comes to navigating the database, representing its structure at a glance, understanding structure-property relations, eliminating duplicates and identifying inconsistencies. Here we present a case study, based on a data set of conformers of amino acids and dipeptides, of how machine-learning techniques can help addressing these issues. We will exploit a recently developed strategy to define a metric between structures, and use it as the basis of both clustering and dimensionality reduction techniques showing how these can help reveal structure-property relations, identify outliers and inconsistent structures, and rationalise how perturbations (e.g. binding of ions to the molecule) affect the stability of different conformers.
Computational study of molecules and materials from first principles is a cornerstone of physics, chemistry, and materials science, but limited by the cost of accurate and precise simulations. In settings involving many simulations, machine learning can reduce these costs, often by orders of magnitude, by interpolating between reference simulations. This requires representations that describe any molecule or material and support interpolation. We comprehensively review and discuss current representations and relations between them, using a unified mathematical framework based on many-body functions, group averaging, and tensor products. For selected state-of-the-art representations, we compare energy predictions for organic molecules, binary alloys, and Al-Ga-In sesquioxides in numerical experiments controlled for data distribution, regression method, and hyper-parameter optimization.
The gas-phase structures of four difluoroiodobenzene and two dihydroxybromobenzene isomers were identified by correlating the emission angles of atomic fragment ions created following femtosecond laser-induced Coulomb explosion. The structural determinations were facilitated by confining the most polarizable axis of each molecule to the detection plane prior to the Coulomb explosion event using one-dimensional laser-induced adiabatic alignment. For a molecular target consisting of two difluoroiodobenzene isomers, each constituent structure could additionally be singled out and distinguished.
This article reviews recent developments in tests of fundamental physics using atoms and molecules, including the subjects of parity violation, searches for permanent electric dipole moments, tests of the CPT theorem and Lorentz symmetry, searches for spatiotemporal variation of fundamental constants, tests of quantum electrodynamics, tests of general relativity and the equivalence principle, searches for dark matter, dark energy and extra forces, and tests of the spin-statistics theorem. Key results are presented in the context of potential new physics and in the broader context of similar investigations in other fields. Ongoing and future experiments of the next decade are discussed.