Nanoengineered metal@zeolite materials have recently
emerged as
a promising class of catalysts for several industrially relevant reactions.
These materials, which consist of small transition metal nanoclusters
confined within three-dimensional zeolite pores, are interesting because
they show higher stability and better sintering resistance under reaction
conditions. While several such hybrid catalysts have been reported
experimentally, key questions such as the impact of the zeolite frameworks
on the properties of the metal clusters are not well understood. To
address such knowledge gaps, in this study, we report a robust and
transferable machine learning-based potential (MLP) that is capable
of describing the structure, stability, and dynamics of zeolite-confined
gold nanoclusters. Specifically, we show that the resulting MLP maintains ab initio accuracy across a range of temperatures (300–1000
K) and can be used to investigate time scales (>10 ns), length
scales
(ca. 10,000 atoms), and phenomena (e.g., ensemble-averaged stability
and diffusivity) that are typically inaccessible using density functional
theory (DFT). Taken together, this study represents an important step
in enabling the rational theory-guided design of metal@zeolite catalysts.