The development of high-resolution imaging methods such as electron and scanning probe microscopy and atomic probe tomography have provided a wealth of information on structure and functionalities of solids. The availability of this data in turn nece
ssitates development of approaches to derive quantitative physical information, much like the development of scattering methods in the early XX century which have given one of the most powerful tools in condensed matter physics arsenal. Here, we argue that this transition requires adapting classical macroscopic definitions, that can in turn enable fundamentally new opportunities in understanding physics and chemistry. For example, many macroscopic definitions such as symmetry can be introduced locally only in a Bayesian sense, balancing the prior knowledge of materials physics and experimental data to yield posterior probability distributions. At the same time, a wealth of local data allows fundamentally new approaches for the description of solids based on construction of statistical and physical generative models, akin to Ginzburg-Landau thermodynamic models. Finally, we note that availability of observational data opens pathways towards exploring causal mechanisms underpinning solid structure and functionality.
Recent advances in (scanning) transmission electron microscopy have enabled routine generation of large volumes of high-veracity structural data on 2D and 3D materials, naturally offering the challenge of using these as starting inputs for atomistic
simulations. In this fashion, theory will address experimentally emerging structures, as opposed to the full range of theoretically possible atomic configurations. However, this challenge is highly non-trivial due to the extreme disparity between intrinsic time scales accessible to modern simulations and microscopy, as well as latencies of microscopy and simulations per se. Addressing this issue requires as a first step bridging the instrumental data flow and physics-based simulation environment, to enable the selection of regions of interest and exploring them using physical simulations. Here we report the development of the machine learning workflow that directly bridges the instrument data stream into Python-based molecular dynamics and density functional theory environments using pre-trained neural networks to convert imaging data to physical descriptors. The pathways to ensure the structural stability and compensate for the observational biases universally present in the data are identified in the workflow. This approach is used for a graphene system to reconstruct optimized geometry and simulate temperature-dependent dynamics including adsorption of Cr as an ad-atom and graphene healing effects. However, it is universal and can be used for other material systems.
Recent advances in the synthesis of polar molecular materials have produced practical alternatives to ferroelectric ceramics, opening up exciting new avenues for their incorporation into modern electronic devices. However, in order to realize the ful
l potential of polar polymer and molecular crystals for modern technological applications, it is paramount to assemble and evaluate all the available data for such compounds, identifying descriptors that could be associated with an emergence of ferroelectricity. In this work, we utilized data-driven approaches to judiciously shortlist candidate materials from a wide chemical space that could possess ferroelectric functionalities. An importance-sampling based method was utilized to address the challenge of having a limited amount of available data on already known organic ferroelectrics. Sets of molecular- and crystal-level descriptors were combined with a Random Forest Regression algorithm in order to predict spontaneous polarization of the shortlisted compounds with an average error of ~20%.
Over the last decade, scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) has emerged as a powerful tool for probing atomic structures of complex materials with picometer precision, opening the pathway toward exploring ferroelectric, ferroelastic, and c
hemical phenomena on the atomic-scale. Analyses to date extracting a polarization signal from lattice coupled distortions in STEM imaging rely on discovery of atomic positions from intensity maxima/minima and subsequent calculation of polarization and other order parameter fields from the atomic displacements. Here, we explore the feasibility of polarization mapping directly from the analysis of STEM images using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). In this approach, the DCNN is trained on the labeled part of the image (i.e., for human labelling), and the trained network is subsequently applied to other images. We explore the effects of the choice of the descriptors (centered on atomic columns and grid-based), the effects of observational bias, and whether the network trained on one composition can be applied to a different one. This analysis demonstrates the tremendous potential of the DCNN for the analysis of high-resolution STEM imaging and spectral data and highlights the associated limitations.
