September 2018 – Materials Virtual Lab

September 18, 2018News, Publications

Deep neural networks can predict crystal stability

Weike’s paper on “Deep Neural Networks for Accurate Predictions of Crystal Stability” is now out in Nature Communications. Predicting the stability of crystals is one of the central problems in materials science. Here, we show that deep neural networks, i.e., algorithms that mimic the animal brain, utilizing just the electronegativity and ionic radii as inputs can predict formation energies of crystals with extremely high accuracy. We also demonstrate how these models can be generalized for mixed crystals using a binary encoding scheme, and use it to identify thousands of potentially stable new compositions. We have published a web app (http://crystals.ai) that enables anyone to use these models. News: UCSD News: Scientists use artificial neural networks to predict new stable materials Paper: W. Ye, C. Chen, Z. Wang, I.-H. Chu, S.P. Ong, Deep neural networks for accurate predictions of crystal stability, Nat. Commun. 9 (2018) 3800. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-06322-x.

September 14, 2018Publications

Accurate Potentials for Ni-Mo alloys and fcc metals

Xiangguo’s article on “Quantum-accurate spectral neighbor analysis potential models for Ni-Mo binary alloys and fcc metals” has just been published in Physical Review B! In this work, we extend the spectral neighbor analysis potential, or SNAP, approach to fcc Ni-bcc Mo binary alloy systems. These new potentials are a substantial improvement over previous potentials based on the embedded atom method in terms of both energy and property (elastic constants, phonons, surface energies, etc.) predictions. In particular, we show that we can reproduce the Ni-Mo finite temperature phase diagram with high accuracy using the Ni-Mo SNAP model. Such high-accuracy, low-computational-cost SNAP models are an exciting enabler to studies of microstructural properties of alloys. Article: Li, X.-G.; Hu, C.; Chen, C.; Deng, Z.; Luo, J.; Ong, S. P. Quantum-Accurate Spectral Neighbor Analysis Potential Models for Ni-Mo Binary Alloys and Fcc Metals. Phys. Rev. B 2018, 98 (9), 094104, doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.98.094104.

September 10, 2018Publications

New articles on XAS Database and Harnessing the Materials Project

We have recently published two articles in Nature Scientific Data and MRS Bulletin! The first article is a follow-up from our npj Computational Materials article that specifically deals with the scope of data present in the X-ray absorption spectroscopy database (XASDb). The second article is a review on harnessing Materials Project data for machine learning and accelerated discovery. Check out both articles in our publications page!