One of the major design issues in machine learning (ML) models for materials property prediction(MPP) is how to enable the models to learn property related physicochemical features. While many composition...

High-throughput screening has become one of the major strategies for the discovery of novel functional materials. However, its effectiveness is severely limited by the lack of sufficient and diverse materials in current materials repositories such as the open quantum materials database (OQMD). Recent progress in deep learning have enabled generative strategies that learn implicit chemical rules for creating hypothetical materials with new compositions and structures. However, current materials generative models have difficulty in generating structurally diverse, chemically valid, and stable materials. Here we propose CubicGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) based deep neural network model for large scale generative design of novel cubic materials. When trained on 375 749 ternary materials from the OQMD database, the authors show that the model is able to not only rediscover most of the currently known cubic materials but also generate hypothetical materials of new structure prototypes. A total of 506 such materials have been verified by phonon dispersion calculation. Considering the importance of cubic materials in wide applications such as solar panels, the GAN model provides a promising approach to significantly expand existing materials repositories, enabling the discovery of new functional materials via screening. The new crystal structures discovered are freely accessible at www.carolinamatdb.org.

Two-dimensional (2D) materials have emerged as promising functional materials with many applications such as semiconductors and photovoltaics because of their unique optoelectronic properties. Although several thousand 2D materials have been screened in existing materials databases, discovering new 2D materials remains challenging. Herein, we propose a deep learning generative model for composition generation combined with a random forest-based 2D materials classifier to discover new hypothetical 2D materials. Furthermore, a template-based element substitution structure prediction approach is developed to predict the crystal structures of a subset of the newly predicted hypothetical formulas, which allows us to confirm their structure stability using DFT calculations. So far, we have discovered 267 489 new potential 2D materials compositions, where 1485 probability scores are more then 0.95. Among them, we have predicted 101 crystal structures and confirmed 92 2D/layered materials by DFT formation energy calculation. Our results show that generative machine learning models provide an effective way to explore the vast chemical design space for new 2D materials discovery.

As one of the most studied materials, perovskites exhibit a wealth of superior properties that lead to diverse applications. Computational prediction of novel stable perovskite structures has big potential in the discovery of new materials for solar panels, superconductors, thermal electric, and catalytic materials, etc. By addressing one of the key obstacles of machine learning based materials discovery, the lack of sufficient training data, this paper proposes a transfer learning based approach that exploits the high accuracy of the machine learning model trained with physics-informed structural and elemental descriptors. This gradient boosting regressor model (the transfer learning model) allows us to predict the formation energy with sufficient precision of a large number of materials of which only the structural information is available. The enlarged training set is then used to train a convolutional neural network model (the screening model) with the generic Magpie elemental features with high prediction power. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our transfer learning model and screening model compared to the baseline models. We then applied the screening model to filter out promising new perovskite materials out of 21,316 hypothetical perovskite structures with a large portion of them confirmed by existing literature.

The availability and easy access of large-scale experimental and computational materials data have enabled the emergence of accelerated development of algorithms and models for materials property prediction, structure prediction, and generative design of materials. However, the lack of user-friendly materials informatics web servers has severely constrained the wide adoption of such tools in the daily practice of materials screening, tinkering, and design space exploration by materials scientists. Herein we first survey current materials informatics web apps and then propose and develop MaterialsAtlas.org, a web-based materials informatics toolbox for materials discovery, which includes a variety of routinely needed tools for exploratory materials discovery, including material’s composition and structure validity check (e.g. charge neutrality, electronegativity balance, dynamic stability, Pauling rules), materials property prediction (e.g. band gap, elastic moduli, hardness, and thermal conductivity), search for hypothetical materials, and utility tools. These user-friendly tools can be freely accessed at http://www.materialsatlas.org. We argue that such materials informatics apps should be widely developed by the community to speed up materials discovery processes.