Exploring the high-pressure materials genome

A thorough in situ characterization of materials at extreme conditions is challenging, and computational tools such as crystal structural search methods in combination with ab initio calculations are widely used to guide experiments by predicting the composition, structure, and properties of high-pressure compounds. However, such techniques are usually computationally expensive and not suitable for large-scale combinatorial exploration. On the other hand, data-driven computational approaches using large materials databases are useful for the analysis of energetics and stability of hundreds of thousands of compounds, but their utility for materials discovery is largely limited to idealized conditions of zero temperature and pressure. Here, we present a novel framework combining the two computational approaches, using a simple linear approximation to the enthalpy of a compound in conjunction with ambient-conditions data currently available in high-throughput databases of calculated materials properties. We demonstrate its utility by explaining the occurrence of phases in nature that are not ground states at ambient conditions and estimating the pressures at which such ambient-metastable phases become thermodynamically accessible, as well as guiding the exploration of ambient-immiscible binary systems via sophisticated structural search methods to discover new stable high-pressure phases.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure

The Phase Diagram of all Inorganic Materials

Understanding how the arrangement of atoms and their interactions determine material behavior has been the dominant paradigm in materials science. A complementary approach is studying the organizational structure of networks of materials, defined on the basis of interactions between materials themselves. In this work, we present the "phase diagram of all known inorganic materials", an extremely-dense complex network of nearly $2.1 \times 10^4$ stable inorganic materials (nodes) connected with $41 \times 10^6$ tie-lines (edges) defining their two-phase equilibria, as computed via high-throughput density functional theory. We show that the degree distribution of this network follows a lognormal form, with each material connected to on average 18% of the other materials in the network via tie-lines. Analyzing the structure and topology of this network has potential to uncover new materials knowledge inaccessible from the traditional bottom-up (atoms to materials) approaches. As an example, we derive a data-driven metric for the reactivity of a material as characterized by its connectedness in the network, and quantitatively identify the noblest materials in nature

By how much can closed-loop frameworks accelerate computational materials discovery?

The implementation of automation and machine learning surrogatization within closed-loop computational workflows is an increasingly popular approach to accelerate materials discovery. However, the scale of the speedup associated with this paradigm shift from traditional manual approaches remains an open question. In this work, we rigorously quantify the acceleration from each of the components within a closed-loop framework for material hypothesis evaluation by identifying four distinct sources of speedup: (1) task automation, (2) calculation runtime improvements, (3) sequential learning-driven design space search, and (4) surrogatization of expensive simulations with machine learning models. This is done using a time-keeping ledger to record runs of automated software and corresponding manual computational experiments within the context of electrocatalysis. From a combination of the first three sources of acceleration, we estimate that overall hypothesis evaluation time can be reduced by over 90%, i.e., achieving a speedup of $\sim$$10\times$. Further, by introducing surrogatization into the loop, we estimate that the design time can be reduced by over 95%, i.e., achieving a speedup of $\sim$$15$-$20\times$. Our findings present a clear value proposition for utilizing closed-loop approaches for accelerating materials discovery.Comment: added Supplementary Informatio