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Apr 23

Machine learning for materials discovery: two-dimensional topological insulators

One of the main goals and challenges of materials discovery is to find the best candidates for each interest property or application. Machine learning rises in this context to efficiently optimize this search, exploring the immense materials space, consisting of simultaneously the atomic, compositional, and structural spaces. Topological insulators, presenting symmetry-protected metallic edge states, are a promising class of materials for different applications. However, further, development is limited by the scarcity of viable candidates. Here we present and discuss machine learning-accelerated strategies for searching the materials space for two-dimensional topological materials. We show the importance of detailed investigations of each machine learning component, leading to different results. Using recently created databases containing thousands of ab initio calculations of 2D materials, we train machine learning models capable of determining the electronic topology of materials, with an accuracy of over 90%. We can then generate and screen thousands of novel materials, efficiently predicting their topological character without the need for a priori structural knowledge. We discover 56 non-trivial materials, of which 17 novel insulating candidates for further investigation, for which we corroborate their topological properties with density functional theory calculations. This strategy is 10times more efficient than the trial-and-error approach while few orders of magnitude faster and is a proof of concept for guiding improved materials discovery search strategies.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 14, 2021

Weyl, Dirac and high-fold chiral fermions in topological quantum materials

Quantum materials hosting Weyl fermions have opened a new era of research in condensed matter physics. First proposed in 1929 in particle physics, Weyl fermions have yet to be observed as elementary particles. In 2015, Weyl fermions were detected as collective electronic excitations in the strong spin-orbit coupled material tantalum arsenide, TaAs. This discovery was followed by a flurry of experimental and theoretical explorations of Weyl phenomena in materials. Weyl materials naturally lend themselves to the exploration of the topological index associated with Weyl fermions and their divergent Berry curvature field, as well as the topological bulk-boundary correspondence giving rise to protected conducting surface states. Here, we review the broader class of Weyl topological phenomena in materials, starting with the observation of emergent Weyl fermions in the bulk and of Fermi arc states on the surface of the TaAs family of crystals by photoemission spectroscopy. We then discuss some of the exotic optical and magnetic responses observed in these materials, as well as the progress in developing some of the related chiral materials. We discuss the conceptual development of high-fold chiral fermions, which generalize Weyl fermions, and we review the observation of high-fold chiral fermion phases by taking the rhodium silicide, RhSi, family of crystals as a prime example. Lastly, we discuss recent advances in Weyl-line phases in magnetic topological materials. With this Review, we aim to provide an introduction to the basic concepts underlying Weyl physics in condensed matter, and to representative materials and their electronic structures and topology as revealed by spectroscopic studies. We hope this work serves as a guide for future theoretical and experimental explorations of chiral fermions and related topological quantum systems with potentially enhanced functionalities.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 2, 2021

CktGNN: Circuit Graph Neural Network for Electronic Design Automation

The electronic design automation of analog circuits has been a longstanding challenge in the integrated circuit field due to the huge design space and complex design trade-offs among circuit specifications. In the past decades, intensive research efforts have mostly been paid to automate the transistor sizing with a given circuit topology. By recognizing the graph nature of circuits, this paper presents a Circuit Graph Neural Network (CktGNN) that simultaneously automates the circuit topology generation and device sizing based on the encoder-dependent optimization subroutines. Particularly, CktGNN encodes circuit graphs using a two-level GNN framework (of nested GNN) where circuits are represented as combinations of subgraphs in a known subgraph basis. In this way, it significantly improves design efficiency by reducing the number of subgraphs to perform message passing. Nonetheless, another critical roadblock to advancing learning-assisted circuit design automation is a lack of public benchmarks to perform canonical assessment and reproducible research. To tackle the challenge, we introduce Open Circuit Benchmark (OCB), an open-sourced dataset that contains 10K distinct operational amplifiers with carefully-extracted circuit specifications. OCB is also equipped with communicative circuit generation and evaluation capabilities such that it can help to generalize CktGNN to design various analog circuits by producing corresponding datasets. Experiments on OCB show the extraordinary advantages of CktGNN through representation-based optimization frameworks over other recent powerful GNN baselines and human experts' manual designs. Our work paves the way toward a learning-based open-sourced design automation for analog circuits. Our source code is available at https://github.com/zehao-dong/CktGNN.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 30, 2023

High-throughput calculations of magnetic topological materials

The discoveries of intrinsically magnetic topological materials, including semimetals with a large anomalous Hall effect and axion insulators, have directed fundamental research in solid-state materials. Topological quantum chemistry has enabled the understanding of and the search for paramagnetic topological materials. Using magnetic topological indices obtained from magnetic topological quantum chemistry (MTQC), here we perform a high-throughput search for magnetic topological materials based on first-principles calculations. We use as our starting point the Magnetic Materials Database on the Bilbao Crystallographic Server, which contains more than 549 magnetic compounds with magnetic structures deduced from neutron-scattering experiments, and identify 130 enforced semimetals (for which the band crossings are implied by symmetry eigenvalues), and topological insulators. For each compound, we perform complete electronic structure calculations, which include complete topological phase diagrams using different values of the Hubbard potential. Using a custom code to find the magnetic co-representations of all bands in all magnetic space groups, we generate data to be fed into the algorithm of MTQC to determine the topology of each magnetic material. Several of these materials display previously unknown topological phases, including symmetry-indicated magnetic semimetals, three-dimensional anomalous Hall insulators and higher-order magnetic semimetals. We analyse topological trends in the materials under varying interactions: 60 per cent of the 130 topological materials have topologies sensitive to interactions, and the others have stable topologies under varying interactions. We provide a materials database for future experimental studies and open-source code for diagnosing topologies of magnetic materials.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 28, 2020

2D Theoretically Twistable Material Database

The study of twisted two-dimensional (2D) materials, where twisting layers create moiré superlattices, has opened new opportunities for investigating topological phases and strongly correlated physics. While systems such as twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) and twisted transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have been extensively studied, the broader potential of a seemingly infinite set of other twistable 2D materials remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we define "theoretically twistable materials" as single- or multi-layer structures that allow for the construction of simple continuum models of their moiré structures. This excludes, for example, materials with a "spaghetti" of bands or those with numerous crossing points at the Fermi level, for which theoretical moiré modeling is unfeasible. We present a high-throughput algorithm that systematically searches for theoretically twistable semimetals and insulators based on the Topological 2D Materials Database. By analyzing key electronic properties, we identify thousands of new candidate materials that could host rich topological and strongly correlated phenomena when twisted. We propose representative twistable materials for realizing different types of moiré systems, including materials with different Bravais lattices, valleys, and strength of spin-orbital coupling. We provide examples of crystal growth for several of these materials and showcase twisted bilayer band structures along with simplified twisted continuum models. Our results significantly broaden the scope of moiré heterostructures and provide a valuable resource for future experimental and theoretical studies on novel moiré systems.

  • 25 authors
·
Nov 14, 2024

Matters Arising from S. Vaitiekenas et al., "Zero-bias peaks at zero magnetic field in ferromagnetic hybrid nanowires" Nature Physics 2021

In 2021 Nature Physics published a paper by Vaitiekenas, Liu, Krogstrup and Marcus titled "Zero-bias peaks at zero magnetic field in ferromagnetic hybrid nanowires". The paper reports low temperature transport measurements on semiconductor InAs nanowires with two partly overlapping shells -- a shell of EuS, a magnetic insulator, and a shell of Al, a metal that becomes superconducting at temperatures below 1.2K. The paper claims that (1) the data are consistent with induced topological superconductivity and Majorana zero modes (MZMs), and (2) that this is facilitated by the breaking of the time reversal symmetry through a direct magnetic interaction with the EuS shell. In this Matters Arising, we present an alternative explanation which is based on trivial effects that are likely to appear in the reported geometry. Specifically, first, we find that data the authors present in support of the topological superconductivity claim can originate from unintended quantum dots in their devices, a widely known likely explanation that is not being discussed in the paper. Second, our analysis of the setup, supported by our numerical micromagnetic simulations, shows similar effects could be obtained due to stray magnetic fields from the region of the EuS shell damaged during Al etching. This basic picture should come before the exotic interpretation in terms of magnetic exchange interaction with a ferromagnetic insulator.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 7, 2025

Topological Materials for Near-Field Radiative Heat Transfer

Topological materials provide a platform that utilizes the geometric characteristics of structured materials to control the flow of waves, enabling unidirectional and protected transmission that is immune to defects or impurities. The topologically designed photonic materials can carry quantum states and electromagnetic energy, benefiting nanolasers or quantum photonic systems. This article reviews recent advances in the topological applications of photonic materials for radiative heat transfer, especially in the near field. When the separation distance between media is considerably smaller than the thermal wavelength, the heat transfer exhibits super-Planckian behavior that surpasses Planck's blackbody predictions. Near-field thermal radiation in subwavelength systems supporting surface modes has various applications, including nanoscale thermal management and energy conversion. Photonic materials and structures that support topological surface states show immense potential for enhancing or suppressing near-field thermal radiation. We present various topological effects, such as periodic and quasi-periodic nanoparticle arrays, Dirac and Weyl semimetal-based materials, structures with broken global symmetries, and other topological insulators, on near-field heat transfer. Also, the possibility of realizing near-field thermal radiation in such topological materials for alternative thermal management and heat flux guiding in nano-scale systems is discussed based on the existing technology.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024

Theory of superconducting proximity effect in hole-based hybrid semiconductor-superconductor devices

Hybrid superconductor-semiconductor systems have received a great deal of attention in the last few years because of their potential for quantum engineering, including novel qubits and topological devices. The proximity effect, the process by which the semiconductor inherits superconducting correlations, is an essential physical mechanism of such hybrids. Recent experiments have demonstrated the proximity effect in hole-based semiconductors, but, in contrast to electrons, the precise mechanism by which the hole bands acquire superconducting correlations remains an open question. In addition, hole spins exhibit a complex strong spin-orbit interaction, with largely anisotropic responses to electric and magnetic fields, further motivating the importance of understanding the interplay between such effects and the proximity effect. In this work, we analyze this physics with focus on germanium-based two-dimensional gases. Specifically, we develop an effective theory supported by full numerics, allowing us to extract various analytical expressions and predict different types of superconducting correlations including non-standard forms of singlet and triplet pairing mechanisms with non-trivial momentum dependence; as well as different Zeeman and Rashba spin-orbit contributions. This, together with their precise dependence on electric and magnetic fields, allows us to make specific experimental predictions, including the emergence of f-type superconductivity, Bogoliubov Fermi surfaces, and gapless regimes caused by large in-plane magnetic fields.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 30, 2024

TopoReformer: Mitigating Adversarial Attacks Using Topological Purification in OCR Models

Adversarially perturbed images of text can cause sophisticated OCR systems to produce misleading or incorrect transcriptions from seemingly invisible changes to humans. Some of these perturbations even survive physical capture, posing security risks to high-stakes applications such as document processing, license plate recognition, and automated compliance systems. Existing defenses, such as adversarial training, input preprocessing, or post-recognition correction, are often model-specific, computationally expensive, and affect performance on unperturbed inputs while remaining vulnerable to unseen or adaptive attacks. To address these challenges, TopoReformer is introduced, a model-agnostic reformation pipeline that mitigates adversarial perturbations while preserving the structural integrity of text images. Topology studies properties of shapes and spaces that remain unchanged under continuous deformations, focusing on global structures such as connectivity, holes, and loops rather than exact distance. Leveraging these topological features, TopoReformer employs a topological autoencoder to enforce manifold-level consistency in latent space and improve robustness without explicit gradient regularization. The proposed method is benchmarked on EMNIST, MNIST, against standard adversarial attacks (FGSM, PGD, Carlini-Wagner), adaptive attacks (EOT, BDPA), and an OCR-specific watermark attack (FAWA).

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 19, 2025

Roadmap: 2D Materials for Quantum Technologies

Two-dimensional (2D) materials have emerged as a versatile and powerful platform for quantum technologies, offering atomic-scale control, strong quantum confinement, and seamless integration into heterogeneous device architectures. Their reduced dimensionality enables unique quantum phenomena, including optically addressable spin defects, tunable single-photon emitters, low-dimensional magnetism, gate-controlled superconductivity, and correlated states in Moiré superlattices. This Roadmap provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress and future directions in exploiting 2D materials for quantum sensing, computation, communication, and simulation. We survey advances spanning spin defects and quantum sensing, quantum emitters and nonlinear photonics, computational theory and data-driven discovery of quantum defects, spintronic and magnonic devices, cavity-engineered quantum materials, superconducting and hybrid quantum circuits, quantum dots, Moiré quantum simulators, and quantum communication platforms. Across these themes, we identify common challenges in defect control, coherence preservation, interfacial engineering, and scalable integration, alongside emerging opportunities driven by machine-learning-assisted design and integrated experiment-theory feedback loops. By connecting microscopic quantum states to mesoscopic excitations and macroscopic device architectures, this Roadmap outlines a materials-centric framework for integrating coherent quantum functionalities and positions 2D materials as foundational building blocks for next-generation quantum technologies.

  • 32 authors
·
Dec 16, 2025

First Order Quantum Phase Transition in the Hybrid Metal-Mott Insulator Transition Metal Dichalcogenide 4Hb-TaS2

Coupling together distinct correlated and topologically non-trivial electronic phases of matter can potentially induce novel electronic orders and phase transitions among them. Transition metal dichalcogenide compounds serve as a bedrock for exploration of such hybrid systems. They host a variety of exotic electronic phases and their Van der Waals nature enables to admix them, either by exfoliation and stacking or by stoichiometric growth, and thereby induce novel correlated complexes. Here we investigate the compound 4Hb-TaS_2 that interleaves the Mott-insulating state of 1T-TaS_2 and the putative spin liquid it hosts together with the metallic state of 2H-TaS_2 and the low temperature superconducting phase it harbors. We reveal a thermodynamic phase diagram that hosts a first order quantum phase transition between a correlated Kondo cluster state and a flat band state in which the Kondo cluster becomes depleted. We demonstrate that this intrinsic transition can be induced by an electric field and temperature as well as by manipulation of the interlayer coupling with the probe tip, hence allowing to reversibly toggle between the Kondo cluster and the flat band states. The phase transition is manifested by a discontinuous change of the complete electronic spectrum accompanied by hysteresis and low frequency noise. We find that the shape of the transition line in the phase diagram is determined by the local compressibility and the entropy of the two electronic states. Our findings set such heterogeneous structures as an exciting platform for systematic investigation and manipulation of Mott-metal transitions and strongly correlated phases and quantum phase transitions therein.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 2, 2023

TOMATOES: Topology and Material Optimization for Latent Heat Thermal Energy Storage Devices

Latent heat thermal energy storage (LHTES) systems are compelling candidates for energy storage, primarily owing to their high storage density. Improving their performance is crucial for developing the next-generation efficient and cost effective devices. Topology optimization (TO) has emerged as a powerful computational tool to design LHTES systems by optimally distributing a high-conductivity material (HCM) and a phase change material (PCM). However, conventional TO typically limits to optimizing the geometry for a fixed, pre-selected materials. This approach does not leverage the large and expanding databases of novel materials. Consequently, the co-design of material and geometry for LHTES remains a challenge and unexplored. To address this limitation, we present an automated design framework for the concurrent optimization of material choice and topology. A key challenge is the discrete nature of material selection, which is incompatible with the gradient-based methods used for TO. We overcome this by using a data-driven variational autoencoder (VAE) to project discrete material databases for both the HCM and PCM onto continuous and differentiable latent spaces. These continuous material representations are integrated into an end-to-end differentiable, transient nonlinear finite-element solver that accounts for phase change. We demonstrate this framework on a problem aimed at maximizing the discharged energy within a specified time, subject to cost constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through several illustrative examples.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 8, 2025

Graph Neural Networks Based Analog Circuit Link Prediction

Circuit link prediction, which identifies missing component connections from incomplete netlists, is crucial in analog circuit design automation. However, existing methods face three main challenges: 1) Insufficient use of topological patterns in circuit graphs reduces prediction accuracy; 2) Data scarcity due to the complexity of annotations hinders model generalization; 3) Limited adaptability to various netlist formats restricts model flexibility. We propose Graph Neural Networks Based Analog Circuit Link Prediction (GNN-ACLP), a graph neural networks (GNNs) based method featuring three innovations to tackle these challenges. First, we introduce the SEAL (learning from Subgraphs, Embeddings, and Attributes for Link prediction) framework and achieve port-level accuracy in circuit link prediction. Second, we propose Netlist Babel Fish, a netlist format conversion tool that leverages retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with a large language model (LLM) to enhance the compatibility of netlist formats. Finally, we build a comprehensive dataset, SpiceNetlist, comprising 775 annotated circuits of 7 different types across 10 component classes. Experiments demonstrate accuracy improvements of 16.08% on SpiceNetlist, 11.38% on Image2Net, and 16.01% on Masala-CHAI compared to the baseline in intra-dataset evaluation, while maintaining accuracy from 92.05% to 99.07% in cross-dataset evaluation, demonstrating robust feature transfer capabilities. However, its linear computational complexity makes processing large-scale netlists challenging and requires future addressing.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 14, 2025

Emergence of a new band and the Lifshitz transition in kagome metal ScV_6Sn_6 with charge density wave

Topological kagome systems have been a topic of great interest in condensed matter physics due totheir unique electronic properties. The vanadium-based kagome materials are particularly intrigu-ing since they exhibit exotic phenomena such as charge density wave (CDW) and unconventionalsuperconductivity. The origin of these electronic instabilities is not fully understood, and the re-cent discovery of a charge density wave in ScV6Sn6provides a new avenue for investigation. In thiswork, we investigate the electronic structure of the novel kagome metal ScV6Sn6using angle resolvedphotoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), and first-principlesdensity functional theory calculations. Our analysis reveals for the first time the temperature-dependent band changes of ScV6Sn6and identifies a new band that exhibits a strong signatureof a structure with CDW below the critical temperature. Further analysis revealed that this newband is due to the surface kagome layer of the CDW structure. In addition, a Lifshitz transition isidentified in the ARPES spectra that is related to the saddle point moving across the Fermi levelat the critical temperature for the CDW formation. This result shows the CDW behavior may alsobe related to nesting of the saddle point, similar to related materials. However, no energy gap is observed at the Fermi level and thus the CDW is not a typical Fermi surface nesting scenario. These results provide new insights into the underlying physics of the CDW in the kagome materials and could have implications for the development of materials with new functionality.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 27, 2023

Correlated Electron Materials and Field Effect Transistors for Logic: A Review

Correlated electron systems are among the centerpieces of modern condensed matter sciences, where many interesting physical phenomena, such as metal-insulator transition and high-Tc superconductivity appear. Recent efforts have been focused on electrostatic doping of such materials to probe the underlying physics without introducing disorder as well as to build field-effect transistors that may complement conventional semiconductor metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) technology. This review focuses on metal-insulator transition mechanisms in correlated electron materials and three-terminal field effect devices utilizing such correlated oxides as the channel layer. We first describe how electron-disorder interaction, electron-phonon interaction and/or electron correlation in solids could modify the electronic properties of materials and lead to metal-insulator transitions. Then we analyze experimental efforts toward utilizing these transitions in field effect transistors and their underlying principles. It is pointed out that correlated electron systems show promise among these various materials displaying phase transitions for logic technologies. Furthermore, novel phenomena emerging from electronic correlation could enable new functionalities in field effect devices. We then briefly review unconventional electrostatic gating techniques, such as ionic liquid gating and ferroelectric gating, which enables ultra large carrier accumulation density in the correlated materials which could in turn lead to phase transitions. The review concludes with a brief discussion on the prospects and suggestions for future research directions in correlated oxide electronics for information processing.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 11, 2012

AnalogGenie: A Generative Engine for Automatic Discovery of Analog Circuit Topologies

The massive and large-scale design of foundational semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) is crucial to sustaining the advancement of many emerging and future technologies, such as generative AI, 5G/6G, and quantum computing. Excitingly, recent studies have shown the great capabilities of foundational models in expediting the design of digital ICs. Yet, applying generative AI techniques to accelerate the design of analog ICs remains a significant challenge due to critical domain-specific issues, such as the lack of a comprehensive dataset and effective representation methods for analog circuits. This paper proposes, AnalogGenie, a textbf{Gen}erattextbf{i}ve textbf{e}ngine for automatic design/discovery of textbf{Analog} circuit topologies--the most challenging and creative task in the conventional manual design flow of analog ICs. AnalogGenie addresses two key gaps in the field: building a foundational comprehensive dataset of analog circuit topology and developing a scalable sequence-based graph representation universal to analog circuits. Experimental results show the remarkable generation performance of AnalogGenie in broadening the variety of analog ICs, increasing the number of devices within a single design, and discovering unseen circuit topologies far beyond any prior arts. Our work paves the way to transform the longstanding time-consuming manual design flow of analog ICs to an automatic and massive manner powered by generative AI. Our source code is available at https://github.com/xz-group/AnalogGenie.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 28, 2025

Rise and Fall of Anderson Localization by Lattice Vibrations: A Time-Dependent Machine Learning Approach

The intricate relationship between electrons and the crystal lattice is a linchpin in condensed matter, traditionally described by the Fr\"ohlich model encompassing the lowest-order lattice-electron coupling. Recently developed quantum acoustics, emphasizing the wave nature of lattice vibrations, has enabled the exploration of previously uncharted territories of electron-lattice interaction not accessible with conventional tools such as perturbation theory. In this context, our agenda here is two-fold. First, we showcase the application of machine learning methods to categorize various interaction regimes within the subtle interplay of electrons and the dynamical lattice landscape. Second, we shed light on a nebulous region of electron dynamics identified by the machine learning approach and then attribute it to transient localization, where strong lattice vibrations result in a momentary Anderson prison for electronic wavepackets, which are later released by the evolution of the lattice. Overall, our research illuminates the spectrum of dynamics within the Fr\"ohlich model, such as transient localization, which has been suggested as a pivotal factor contributing to the mysteries surrounding strange metals. Furthermore, this paves the way for utilizing time-dependent perspectives in machine learning techniques for designing materials with tailored electron-lattice properties.

  • 4 authors
·
May 27, 2024

AnalogToBi: Device-Level Analog Circuit Topology Generation via Bipartite Graph and Grammar Guided Decoding

Automatic generation of device-level analog circuit topologies remains a fundamental challenge in analog design automation. Recent transformer-based approaches have shown promise, yet they often suffer from limited functional controllability, memorization of training data, and the generation of electrically invalid circuits. We propose AnalogToBi, a device-level analog circuit topology generation framework that addresses these limitations. AnalogToBi enables explicit functional control via a circuit type token and adopts a bipartite graph-based circuit representation that decouples positional ordering from functional semantics, encouraging structural reasoning over sequence memorization. In addition, grammar-guided decoding enforces electrical validity during generation, while apply device renaming-based data augmentation improves generalization by increasing sequence diversity without altering circuit functionality. Experimental results show that AnalogToBi achieves 97.8% validity and 92.1% novelty, resulting in 89.9% valid and novel circuits under conditional generation, without human expert involvement. We further present that generated circuits can be automatically translated into SPICE netlists, and SPICE simulations confirm that AnalogToBi discovers high-quality analog topologies that outperform prior methods. For code and supplementary materials, see https://github.com/Seungmin0825/AnalogToBi

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 10

Accelerating Scientific Discovery with Generative Knowledge Extraction, Graph-Based Representation, and Multimodal Intelligent Graph Reasoning

Leveraging generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), we have transformed a dataset comprising 1,000 scientific papers into an ontological knowledge graph. Through an in-depth structural analysis, we have calculated node degrees, identified communities and connectivities, and evaluated clustering coefficients and betweenness centrality of pivotal nodes, uncovering fascinating knowledge architectures. The graph has an inherently scale-free nature, is highly connected, and can be used for graph reasoning by taking advantage of transitive and isomorphic properties that reveal unprecedented interdisciplinary relationships that can be used to answer queries, identify gaps in knowledge, propose never-before-seen material designs, and predict material behaviors. We compute deep node embeddings for combinatorial node similarity ranking for use in a path sampling strategy links dissimilar concepts that have previously not been related. One comparison revealed structural parallels between biological materials and Beethoven's 9th Symphony, highlighting shared patterns of complexity through isomorphic mapping. In another example, the algorithm proposed a hierarchical mycelium-based composite based on integrating path sampling with principles extracted from Kandinsky's 'Composition VII' painting. The resulting material integrates an innovative set of concepts that include a balance of chaos/order, adjustable porosity, mechanical strength, and complex patterned chemical functionalization. We uncover other isomorphisms across science, technology and art, revealing a nuanced ontology of immanence that reveal a context-dependent heterarchical interplay of constituents. Graph-based generative AI achieves a far higher degree of novelty, explorative capacity, and technical detail, than conventional approaches and establishes a widely useful framework for innovation by revealing hidden connections.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 18, 2024

Hardware-efficient Variational Quantum Eigensolver for Small Molecules and Quantum Magnets

Quantum computers can be used to address molecular structure, materials science and condensed matter physics problems, which currently stretch the limits of existing high-performance computing resources. Finding exact numerical solutions to these interacting fermion problems has exponential cost, while Monte Carlo methods are plagued by the fermionic sign problem. These limitations of classical computational methods have made even few-atom molecular structures problems of practical interest for medium-sized quantum computers. Yet, thus far experimental implementations have been restricted to molecules involving only Period I elements. Here, we demonstrate the experimental optimization of up to six-qubit Hamiltonian problems with over a hundred Pauli terms, determining the ground state energy for molecules of increasing size, up to BeH2. This is enabled by a hardware-efficient variational quantum eigensolver with trial states specifically tailored to the available interactions in our quantum processor, combined with a compact encoding of fermionic Hamiltonians and a robust stochastic optimization routine. We further demonstrate the flexibility of our approach by applying the technique to a problem of quantum magnetism. Across all studied problems, we find agreement between experiment and numerical simulations with a noisy model of the device. These results help elucidate the requirements for scaling the method to larger systems, and aim at bridging the gap between problems at the forefront of high-performance computing and their implementation on quantum hardware.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 17, 2017

CHGNet: Pretrained universal neural network potential for charge-informed atomistic modeling

The simulation of large-scale systems with complex electron interactions remains one of the greatest challenges for the atomistic modeling of materials. Although classical force fields often fail to describe the coupling between electronic states and ionic rearrangements, the more accurate ab-initio molecular dynamics suffers from computational complexity that prevents long-time and large-scale simulations, which are essential to study many technologically relevant phenomena, such as reactions, ion migrations, phase transformations, and degradation. In this work, we present the Crystal Hamiltonian Graph neural Network (CHGNet) as a novel machine-learning interatomic potential (MLIP), using a graph-neural-network-based force field to model a universal potential energy surface. CHGNet is pretrained on the energies, forces, stresses, and magnetic moments from the Materials Project Trajectory Dataset, which consists of over 10 years of density functional theory static and relaxation trajectories of sim 1.5 million inorganic structures. The explicit inclusion of magnetic moments enables CHGNet to learn and accurately represent the orbital occupancy of electrons, enhancing its capability to describe both atomic and electronic degrees of freedom. We demonstrate several applications of CHGNet in solid-state materials, including charge-informed molecular dynamics in Li_xMnO_2, the finite temperature phase diagram for Li_xFePO_4 and Li diffusion in garnet conductors. We critically analyze the significance of including charge information for capturing appropriate chemistry, and we provide new insights into ionic systems with additional electronic degrees of freedom that can not be observed by previous MLIPs.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 27, 2023

GIF: A Conditional Multimodal Generative Framework for IR Drop Imaging in Chip Layouts

IR drop analysis is essential in physical chip design to ensure the power integrity of on-chip power delivery networks. Traditional Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools have become slow and expensive as transistor density scales. Recent works have introduced machine learning (ML)-based methods that formulate IR drop analysis as an image prediction problem. These existing ML approaches fail to capture both local and long-range dependencies and ignore crucial geometrical and topological information from physical layouts and logical connectivity. To address these limitations, we propose GIF, a Generative IR drop Framework that uses both geometrical and topological information to generate IR drop images. GIF fuses image and graph features to guide a conditional diffusion process, producing high-quality IR drop images. For instance, On the CircuitNet-N28 dataset, GIF achieves 0.78 SSIM, 0.95 Pearson correlation, 21.77 PSNR, and 0.026 NMAE, outperforming prior methods. These results demonstrate that our framework, using diffusion based multimodal conditioning, reliably generates high quality IR drop images. This shows that IR drop analysis can effectively leverage recent advances in generative modeling when geometric layout features and logical circuit topology are jointly modeled. By combining geometry aware spatial features with logical graph representations, GIF enables IR drop analysis to benefit from recent advances in generative modeling for structured image generation.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 10

Graphlets correct for the topological information missed by random walks

Random walks are widely used for mining networks due to the computational efficiency of computing them. For instance, graph representation learning learns a d-dimensional embedding space, so that the nodes that tend to co-occur on random walks (a proxy of being in the same network neighborhood) are close in the embedding space. Specific local network topology (i.e., structure) influences the co-occurrence of nodes on random walks, so random walks of limited length capture only partial topological information, hence diminishing the performance of downstream methods. We explicitly capture all topological neighborhood information and improve performance by introducing orbit adjacencies that quantify the adjacencies of two nodes as co-occurring on a given pair of graphlet orbits, which are symmetric positions on graphlets (small, connected, non-isomorphic, induced subgraphs of a large network). Importantly, we mathematically prove that random walks on up to k nodes capture only a subset of all the possible orbit adjacencies for up to k-node graphlets. Furthermore, we enable orbit adjacency-based analysis of networks by developing an efficient GRaphlet-orbit ADjacency COunter (GRADCO), which exhaustively computes all 28 orbit adjacency matrices for up to four-node graphlets. Note that four-node graphlets suffice, because real networks are usually small-world. In large networks on around 20,000 nodes, GRADCOcomputesthe28matricesinminutes. Onsixrealnetworksfromvarious domains, we compare the performance of node-label predictors obtained by using the network embeddings based on our orbit adjacencies to those based on random walks. We find that orbit adjacencies, which include those unseen by random walks, outperform random walk-based adjacencies, demonstrating the importance of the inclusion of the topological neighborhood information that is unseen by random walks.

  • 3 authors
·
May 23, 2024

A Framework for Fast and Stable Representations of Multiparameter Persistent Homology Decompositions

Topological data analysis (TDA) is an area of data science that focuses on using invariants from algebraic topology to provide multiscale shape descriptors for geometric data sets such as point clouds. One of the most important such descriptors is {\em persistent homology}, which encodes the change in shape as a filtration parameter changes; a typical parameter is the feature scale. For many data sets, it is useful to simultaneously vary multiple filtration parameters, for example feature scale and density. While the theoretical properties of single parameter persistent homology are well understood, less is known about the multiparameter case. In particular, a central question is the problem of representing multiparameter persistent homology by elements of a vector space for integration with standard machine learning algorithms. Existing approaches to this problem either ignore most of the multiparameter information to reduce to the one-parameter case or are heuristic and potentially unstable in the face of noise. In this article, we introduce a new general representation framework that leverages recent results on {\em decompositions} of multiparameter persistent homology. This framework is rich in information, fast to compute, and encompasses previous approaches. Moreover, we establish theoretical stability guarantees under this framework as well as efficient algorithms for practical computation, making this framework an applicable and versatile tool for analyzing geometric and point cloud data. We validate our stability results and algorithms with numerical experiments that demonstrate statistical convergence, prediction accuracy, and fast running times on several real data sets.

Hidden orbital polarization in diamond, silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide and layered materials

It was previously believed that the Bloch electronic states of non-magnetic materials with inversion symmetry cannot have finite spin polarizations. However, since the seminal work by Zhang et al. [Nat. Phys. 10, 387-393 (2014)] on local spin polarizations of Bloch states in non-magnetic, centrosymmetric materials, the scope of spintronics has been significantly broadened. Here, we show, using a framework that is universally applicable independent of whether hidden spin polarizations are small (e.g., diamond, Si, Ge, and GaAs) or large (e.g., MoS2 and WSe2), that the corresponding quantity arising from orbital - instead of spin - degrees of freedom, the hidden orbital polarization, is (i) much more abundant in nature since it exists even without spin-orbit coupling and (ii) more fundamental since the interband matrix elements of the site-dependent orbital angular momentum operator determines the hidden spin polarization. We predict that the hidden spin polarization of transition metal dichalcogenides is reduced significantly upon compression. We suggest experimental signatures of hidden orbital polarization from photoemission spectroscopies and demonstrate that the current-induced hidden orbital polarization may play a far more important role than its spin counterpart in antiferromagnetic information technology by calculating the current-driven antiferromagnetism in compressed silicon.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 21, 2016

Disentangling lattice and electronic contributions to the metal-insulator transition from bulk vs. layer confined RNiO_3

In complex oxide materials, changes in electronic properties are often associated with changes in crystal structure, raising the question of the relative roles of the electronic and lattice effects in driving the metal-insulator transition. This paper presents a combined theoretical and experimental analysis of the dependence of the metal-insulator transition of NdNiO_3 on crystal structure, specifically comparing properties of bulk materials to one and two layer samples of NdNiO_3 grown between multiple electronically inert NdAlO_3 counterlayers in a superlattice. The comparison amplifies and validates a theoretical approach developed in previous papers and disentangles the electronic and lattice contributions, through an independent variation of each. In bulk NdNiO_3 the correlations are not strong enough to drive a metal-insulator transition by themselves: a lattice distortion is required. Ultra-thin films exhibit two additional electronic effects and one lattice-related effect. The electronic effects are quantum confinement, leading to dimensional reduction of the electronic Hamiltonian, and an increase in electronic bandwidth due to counterlayer induced bond angle changes. We find that the confinement effect is much more important. The lattice effect is an increase in stiffness due to the cost of propagation of the lattice disproportionation into the confining material.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 30, 2018

Analytical simulations of the resonant transmission of electrons in a closed nanocircuit for terahertz applications where a tunneling junction is shunted by a metallic nanowire

Earlier, in the CINT program at Los Alamos National Laboratory, we focused ultrafast mode-locked lasers on the tip-sample junction of a scanning tunneling microscope to generate currents at hundreds of harmonics of the laser pulse repetition frequency. Each harmonic has a signal-to-noise ratio of 20 dB with a 10-dB linewidth of only 3 Hz. Now we model closed quantum nanocircuits with rectangular, triangular, or delta-function barrier, shunted by a beryllium filament for quasi-coherent electron transport over mean-free paths as great as 68 nm. The time-independent Schrödinger equation is solved with the boundary conditions that the wavefunction and its derivative are continuous at both connections. These four boundary conditions are used to form a four-by-four complex matrix equation with only zeros in the right-hand column vector which is required to have a non-trivial solution with each of the closed nanocircuits. Each model has four parameters: (1) the barrier length, (2) the height and shape of the barrier, (3) the length of the pre-barrier, and (4) the electron energy. Any three of these may be specified and then the fourth is varied to bring the determinant to zero to find the solutions on lines or surfaces in the space defined by the four parameters. First, we use a simplistic model having a rectangular barrier. The second model has a triangular barrier as a first approximation to field emission, and we are considering applying this approach for a self-contained nanoscale extension of our earlier effort to generate the harmonics at Los Alamos. The third model has a delta-function barrier, and the fourth model is an extension of the first one where the width of the rectangular barrier is varied inversely with its height.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 24, 2023

Magnetic Anisotropy in Two-dimensional van der Waals Magnetic Materials and Their Heterostructures: Importance, Mechanisms, and Opportunities

Two-dimensional (2D) magnetism in atomically thin van der Waals (vdW) monolayers and heterostructures has attracted significant attention due to its promising potential for next-generation spintronic and quantum technologies. A key factor in stabilizing long-range magnetic order in these systems is magnetic anisotropy, which plays a crucial role in overcoming the limitations imposed by the Mermin-Wagner theorem. This review provides a comprehensive theoretical and experimental overview of the importance of magnetic anisotropy in enabling intrinsic 2D magnetism and shaping the electronic, magnetic, and topological properties of 2D vdW materials. We begin by summarizing the fundamental mechanisms that determine magnetic anisotropy, emphasizing the contributions from strong ligand spin-orbit coupling of ligand atoms and unquenched orbital magnetic moments. We then examine a range of material engineering approaches, including alloying, doping, electrostatic gating, strain, and pressure, that have been employed to effectively tune magnetic anisotropy in these materials. Finally, we discuss open challenges and promising future directions in this rapidly advancing field. By presenting a broad perspective on the role of magnetic anisotropy in 2D magnetism, this review aims to stimulate ongoing efforts and new ideas toward the realization of robust, room-temperature applications based on 2D vdW magnetic materials and their heterostructures.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 6, 2025

Convolutional Neural Networks and Volcano Plots: Screening and Prediction of Two-Dimensional Single-Atom Catalysts

Single-atom catalysts (SACs) have emerged as frontiers for catalyzing chemical reactions, yet the diverse combinations of active elements and support materials, the nature of coordination environments, elude traditional methodologies in searching optimal SAC systems with superior catalytic performance. Herein, by integrating multi-branch Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) analysis models to hybrid descriptor based activity volcano plot, 2D SAC system composed of diverse metallic single atoms anchored on six type of 2D supports, including graphitic carbon nitride, nitrogen-doped graphene, graphene with dual-vacancy, black phosphorous, boron nitride, and C2N, are screened for efficient CO2RR. Starting from establishing a correlation map between the adsorption energies of intermediates and diverse electronic and elementary descriptors, sole singular descriptor lost magic to predict catalytic activity. Deep learning method utilizing multi-branch CNN model therefore was employed, using 2D electronic density of states as input to predict adsorption energies. Hybrid-descriptor enveloping both C- and O-types of CO2RR intermediates was introduced to construct volcano plots and limiting potential periodic table, aiming for intuitive screening of catalyst candidates for efficient CO2 reduction to CH4. The eDOS occlusion experiments were performed to unravel individual orbital contribution to adsorption energy. To explore the electronic scale principle governing practical engineering catalytic CO2RR activity, orbitalwise eDOS shifting experiments based on CNN model were employed. The study involves examining the adsorption energy and, consequently, catalytic activities while varying supported single atoms. This work offers a tangible framework to inform both theoretical screening and experimental synthesis, thereby paving the way for systematically designing efficient SACs.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 6, 2024

Imaging and controlling electron motion and chemical structural dynamics of biological system in real time and space

Ultrafast electron microscopy (UEM) has found widespread applications in physics, chemistry, and materials science, enabling real-space imaging of dynamics on ultrafast timescales. Recent advances have pushed the temporal resolution of UEM into the attosecond regime, enabling the attomicroscopy technique to directly visualize electron motion. In this work, we extend the capabilities of this powerful imaging tool to investigate ultrafast electron dynamics in a biological system by imaging and controlling light induced electronic and chemical changes in the conductive network of multicellular cable bacteria. Using electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS), we first observed a laser induced increase in {\pi}-electron density, accompanied by spectral peak broadening and a blueshift features indicative of enhanced conductivity and structural modification. We also traced the effect of ultrafast laser pumping on bulk plasmon electron oscillations by monitoring changes in the plasmon like resonance peak. Additionally, we visualized laser induced chemical structural changes in cable bacteria in real space. The imaging results revealed carbon enrichment alongside a depletion of nitrogen and oxygen, highlighting the controllability of chemical dynamics. Moreover, time resolved EELS measurements further revealed a picosecond scale decay and recovery of both {\pi}-electron and plasmonic features, attributed to electron phonon coupling. In addition to shedding light on the mechanism of electron motion in cable bacteria, these findings demonstrate ultrafast modulation and switching of conductivity, underscoring their potential as bio-optoelectronic components operating on ultrafast timescales.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 2, 2025

On the Electron Pairing Mechanism of Copper-Oxide High Temperature Superconductivity

The elementary CuO2 plane sustaining cuprate high-temperature superconductivity occurs typically at the base of a periodic array of edge-sharing CuO5 pyramids. Virtual transitions of electrons between adjacent planar Cu and O atoms, occurring at a rate t/{hbar} and across the charge-transfer energy gap E, generate 'superexchange' spin-spin interactions of energy Japprox4t^4/E^3 in an antiferromagnetic correlated-insulator state. However, Hole doping the CuO2 plane converts this into a very high temperature superconducting state whose electron-pairing is exceptional. A leading proposal for the mechanism of this intense electron-pairing is that, while hole doping destroys magnetic order it preserves pair-forming superexchange interactions governed by the charge-transfer energy scale E. To explore this hypothesis directly at atomic-scale, we combine single-electron and electron-pair (Josephson) scanning tunneling microscopy to visualize the interplay of E and the electron-pair density nP in {Bi_2Sr_2CaCu_2O_{8+x}}. The responses of both E and nP to alterations in the distance {\delta} between planar Cu and apical O atoms are then determined. These data reveal the empirical crux of strongly correlated superconductivity in CuO2, the response of the electron-pair condensate to varying the charge transfer energy. Concurrence of predictions from strong-correlation theory for hole-doped charge-transfer insulators with these observations, indicates that charge-transfer superexchange is the electron-pairing mechanism of superconductive {Bi_2Sr_2CaCu_2O_{8+x}}.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 8, 2021

Materials Expert-Artificial Intelligence for Materials Discovery

The advent of material databases provides an unprecedented opportunity to uncover predictive descriptors for emergent material properties from vast data space. However, common reliance on high-throughput ab initio data necessarily inherits limitations of such data: mismatch with experiments. On the other hand, experimental decisions are often guided by an expert's intuition honed from experiences that are rarely articulated. We propose using machine learning to "bottle" such operational intuition into quantifiable descriptors using expertly curated measurement-based data. We introduce "Materials Expert-Artificial Intelligence" (ME-AI) to encapsulate and articulate this human intuition. As a first step towards such a program, we focus on the topological semimetal (TSM) among square-net materials as the property inspired by the expert-identified descriptor based on structural information: the tolerance factor. We start by curating a dataset encompassing 12 primary features of 879 square-net materials, using experimental data whenever possible. We then use Dirichlet-based Gaussian process regression using a specialized kernel to reveal composite descriptors for square-net topological semimetals. The ME-AI learned descriptors independently reproduce expert intuition and expand upon it. Specifically, new descriptors point to hypervalency as a critical chemical feature predicting TSM within square-net compounds. Our success with a carefully defined problem points to the "machine bottling human insight" approach as promising for machine learning-aided material discovery.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 5, 2023

Higher-Order Knowledge Representations for Agentic Scientific Reasoning

Scientific inquiry requires systems-level reasoning that integrates heterogeneous experimental data, cross-domain knowledge, and mechanistic evidence into coherent explanations. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer inferential capabilities, they often depend on retrieval-augmented contexts that lack structural depth. Traditional Knowledge Graphs (KGs) attempt to bridge this gap, yet their pairwise constraints fail to capture the irreducible higher-order interactions that govern emergent physical behavior. To address this, we introduce a methodology for constructing hypergraph-based knowledge representations that faithfully encode multi-entity relationships. Applied to a corpus of ~1,100 manuscripts on biocomposite scaffolds, our framework constructs a global hypergraph of 161,172 nodes and 320,201 hyperedges, revealing a scale-free topology (power law exponent ~1.23) organized around highly connected conceptual hubs. This representation prevents the combinatorial explosion typical of pairwise expansions and explicitly preserves the co-occurrence context of scientific formulations. We further demonstrate that equipping agentic systems with hypergraph traversal tools, specifically using node-intersection constraints, enables them to bridge semantically distant concepts. By exploiting these higher-order pathways, the system successfully generates grounded mechanistic hypotheses for novel composite materials, such as linking cerium oxide to PCL scaffolds via chitosan intermediates. This work establishes a "teacherless" agentic reasoning system where hypergraph topology acts as a verifiable guardrail, accelerating scientific discovery by uncovering relationships obscured by traditional graph methods.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 8

Accelerating the Search for Superconductors Using Machine Learning

Prediction of critical temperature (T_c) of a superconductor remains a significant challenge in condensed matter physics. While the BCS theory explains superconductivity in conventional superconductors, there is no framework to predict T_c of unconventional, higher T_{c} superconductors. Quantum Structure Diagrams (QSD) were successful in establishing structure-property relationship for superconductors, quasicrystals, and ferroelectric materials starting from chemical composition. Building on the QSD ideas, we demonstrate that the principal component analysis of superconductivity data uncovers the clustering of various classes of superconductors. We use machine learning analysis and cleaned databases of superconductors to develop predictive models of T_c of a superconductor using its chemical composition. Earlier studies relied on datasets with inconsistencies, leading to suboptimal predictions. To address this, we introduce a data-cleaning workflow to enhance the statistical quality of superconducting databases by eliminating redundancies and resolving inconsistencies. With this improvised database, we apply a supervised machine learning framework and develop a Random Forest model to predict superconductivity and T_c as a function of descriptors motivated from Quantum Structure Diagrams. We demonstrate that this model generalizes effectively in reasonably accurate prediction of T_{c} of compounds outside the database. We further employ our model to systematically screen materials across materials databases as well as various chemically plausible combinations of elements and predict Tl_{5}Ba_{6}Ca_{6}Cu_{9}O_{29} to exhibit superconductivity with a T_{c} sim 105 K. Being based on the descriptors used in QSD's, our model bypasses structural information and predicts T_{c} merely from the chemical composition.

  • 2 authors
·
May 17, 2025

Potential and Limitation of High-Frequency Cores and Caches

This paper explores the potential of cryogenic semiconductor computing and superconductor electronics as promising alternatives to traditional semiconductor devices. As semiconductor devices face challenges such as increased leakage currents and reduced performance at higher temperatures, these novel technologies offer high performance and low power computation. Conventional semiconductor electronics operating at cryogenic temperatures (below -150{\deg}C or 123.15 K) can benefit from reduced leakage currents and improved electron mobility. On the other hand, superconductor electronics, operating below 10 K, allow electrons to flow without resistance, offering the potential for ultra-low-power, high-speed computation. This study presents a comprehensive performance modeling and analysis of these technologies and provides insights into their potential benefits and limitations. We implement models of in-order and out-of-order cores operating at high clock frequencies associated with superconductor electronics and cryogenic semiconductor computing in gem5. We evaluate the performance of these components using workloads representative of real-world applications like NPB, SPEC CPU2006, and GAPBS. Our results show the potential speedups achievable by these components and the limitations posed by cache bandwidth. This work provides valuable insights into the performance implications and design trade-offs associated with cryogenic and superconductor technologies, laying the foundation for future research in this field using gem5.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 6, 2024

The Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) Dataset and Community Challenges

Catalyst discovery and optimization is key to solving many societal and energy challenges including solar fuels synthesis, long-term energy storage, and renewable fertilizer production. Despite considerable effort by the catalysis community to apply machine learning models to the computational catalyst discovery process, it remains an open challenge to build models that can generalize across both elemental compositions of surfaces and adsorbate identity/configurations, perhaps because datasets have been smaller in catalysis than related fields. To address this we developed the OC20 dataset, consisting of 1,281,040 Density Functional Theory (DFT) relaxations (~264,890,000 single point evaluations) across a wide swath of materials, surfaces, and adsorbates (nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen chemistries). We supplemented this dataset with randomly perturbed structures, short timescale molecular dynamics, and electronic structure analyses. The dataset comprises three central tasks indicative of day-to-day catalyst modeling and comes with pre-defined train/validation/test splits to facilitate direct comparisons with future model development efforts. We applied three state-of-the-art graph neural network models (CGCNN, SchNet, Dimenet++) to each of these tasks as baseline demonstrations for the community to build on. In almost every task, no upper limit on model size was identified, suggesting that even larger models are likely to improve on initial results. The dataset and baseline models are both provided as open resources, as well as a public leader board to encourage community contributions to solve these important tasks.

  • 17 authors
·
Oct 19, 2020

Multi-property directed generative design of inorganic materials through Wyckoff-augmented transfer learning

Accelerated materials discovery is an urgent demand to drive advancements in fields such as energy conversion, storage, and catalysis. Property-directed generative design has emerged as a transformative approach for rapidly discovering new functional inorganic materials with multiple desired properties within vast and complex search spaces. However, this approach faces two primary challenges: data scarcity for functional properties and the multi-objective optimization required to balance competing tasks. Here, we present a multi-property-directed generative framework designed to overcome these limitations and enhance site symmetry-compliant crystal generation beyond P1 (translational) symmetry. By incorporating Wyckoff-position-based data augmentation and transfer learning, our framework effectively handles sparse and small functional datasets, enabling the generation of new stable materials simultaneously conditioned on targeted space group, band gap, and formation energy. Using this approach, we identified previously unknown thermodynamically and lattice-dynamically stable semiconductors in tetragonal, trigonal, and cubic systems, with bandgaps ranging from 0.13 to 2.20 eV, as validated by density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Additionally, we assessed their thermoelectric descriptors using DFT, indicating their potential suitability for thermoelectric applications. We believe our integrated framework represents a significant step forward in generative design of inorganic materials.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 20, 2025

Convolutional Neural Networks on non-uniform geometrical signals using Euclidean spectral transformation

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been successful in processing data signals that are uniformly sampled in the spatial domain (e.g., images). However, most data signals do not natively exist on a grid, and in the process of being sampled onto a uniform physical grid suffer significant aliasing error and information loss. Moreover, signals can exist in different topological structures as, for example, points, lines, surfaces and volumes. It has been challenging to analyze signals with mixed topologies (for example, point cloud with surface mesh). To this end, we develop mathematical formulations for Non-Uniform Fourier Transforms (NUFT) to directly, and optimally, sample nonuniform data signals of different topologies defined on a simplex mesh into the spectral domain with no spatial sampling error. The spectral transform is performed in the Euclidean space, which removes the translation ambiguity from works on the graph spectrum. Our representation has four distinct advantages: (1) the process causes no spatial sampling error during the initial sampling, (2) the generality of this approach provides a unified framework for using CNNs to analyze signals of mixed topologies, (3) it allows us to leverage state-of-the-art backbone CNN architectures for effective learning without having to design a particular architecture for a particular data structure in an ad-hoc fashion, and (4) the representation allows weighted meshes where each element has a different weight (i.e., texture) indicating local properties. We achieve results on par with the state-of-the-art for the 3D shape retrieval task, and a new state-of-the-art for the point cloud to surface reconstruction task.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 7, 2019

HyperTopo-Adapters: Geometry- and Topology-Aware Segmentation of Leaf Lesions on Frozen Encoders

Leaf-lesion segmentation is topology-sensitive: small merges, splits, or false holes can be biologically meaningful descriptors of biochemical pathways, yet they are weakly penalized by standard pixel-wise losses in Euclidean latents. I explore HyperTopo-Adapters, a lightweight, parameter-efficient head trained on top of a frozen vision encoder, which embeds features on a product manifold -- hyperbolic + Euclidean + spherical (H + E + S) -- to encourage hierarchical separation (H), local linear detail (E), and global closure (S). A topology prior complements Dice/BCE in two forms: (i) persistent-homology (PH) distance for evaluation and selection, and (ii) a differentiable surrogate that combines a soft Euler-characteristic match with total variation regularization for stable training. I introduce warm-ups for both the hyperbolic contrastive term and the topology prior, per-sample evaluation of structure-aware metrics (Boundary-F1, Betti errors, PD distance), and a min-PD within top-K Dice rule for checkpoint selection. On a Kaggle leaf-lesion dataset (N=2,940), early results show consistent gains in boundary and topology metrics (reducing Delta beta_1 hole error by 9%) while Dice/IoU remain competitive. The study is diagnostic by design: I report controlled ablations (curvature learning, latent dimensions, contrastive temperature, surrogate settings), and ongoing tests varying encoder strength (ResNet-50, DeepLabV3, DINOv2/v3), input resolution, PH weight, and partial unfreezing of late blocks. The contribution is an open, reproducible train/eval suite (available at https://github.com/ChimdiWalter/HyperTopo-Adapters) that isolates geometric/topological priors and surfaces failure modes to guide stronger, topology-preserving architectures.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 28, 2025

Stable Vectorization of Multiparameter Persistent Homology using Signed Barcodes as Measures

Persistent homology (PH) provides topological descriptors for geometric data, such as weighted graphs, which are interpretable, stable to perturbations, and invariant under, e.g., relabeling. Most applications of PH focus on the one-parameter case -- where the descriptors summarize the changes in topology of data as it is filtered by a single quantity of interest -- and there is now a wide array of methods enabling the use of one-parameter PH descriptors in data science, which rely on the stable vectorization of these descriptors as elements of a Hilbert space. Although the multiparameter PH (MPH) of data that is filtered by several quantities of interest encodes much richer information than its one-parameter counterpart, the scarceness of stability results for MPH descriptors has so far limited the available options for the stable vectorization of MPH. In this paper, we aim to bring together the best of both worlds by showing how the interpretation of signed barcodes -- a recent family of MPH descriptors -- as signed measures leads to natural extensions of vectorization strategies from one parameter to multiple parameters. The resulting feature vectors are easy to define and to compute, and provably stable. While, as a proof of concept, we focus on simple choices of signed barcodes and vectorizations, we already see notable performance improvements when comparing our feature vectors to state-of-the-art topology-based methods on various types of data.

Limitations of Quantum Hardware for Molecular Energy Estimation Using VQE

Variational quantum eigensolvers (VQEs) are among the most promising quantum algorithms for solving electronic structure problems in quantum chemistry, particularly during the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era. In this study, we investigate the capabilities and limitations of VQE algorithms implemented on current quantum hardware for determining molecular ground-state energies, focusing on the adaptive derivative-assembled pseudo-Trotter ansatz VQE (ADAPT-VQE). To address the significant computational challenges posed by molecular Hamiltonians, we explore various strategies to simplify the Hamiltonian, optimize the ansatz, and improve classical parameter optimization through modifications of the COBYLA optimizer. These enhancements are integrated into a tailored quantum computing implementation designed to minimize the circuit depth and computational cost. Using benzene as a benchmark system, we demonstrate the application of these optimizations on an IBM quantum computer. Despite these improvements, our results highlight the limitations imposed by current quantum hardware, particularly the impact of quantum noise on state preparation and energy measurement. The noise levels in today's devices prevent meaningful evaluations of molecular Hamiltonians with sufficient accuracy to produce reliable quantum chemical insights. Finally, we extrapolate the requirements for future quantum hardware to enable practical and scalable quantum chemistry calculations using VQE algorithms. This work provides a roadmap for advancing quantum algorithms and hardware toward achieving quantum advantage in molecular modeling.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 4, 2025

JARVIS-Leaderboard: A Large Scale Benchmark of Materials Design Methods

Lack of rigorous reproducibility and validation are major hurdles for scientific development across many fields. Materials science in particular encompasses a variety of experimental and theoretical approaches that require careful benchmarking. Leaderboard efforts have been developed previously to mitigate these issues. However, a comprehensive comparison and benchmarking on an integrated platform with multiple data modalities with both perfect and defect materials data is still lacking. This work introduces JARVIS-Leaderboard, an open-source and community-driven platform that facilitates benchmarking and enhances reproducibility. The platform allows users to set up benchmarks with custom tasks and enables contributions in the form of dataset, code, and meta-data submissions. We cover the following materials design categories: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Electronic Structure (ES), Force-fields (FF), Quantum Computation (QC) and Experiments (EXP). For AI, we cover several types of input data, including atomic structures, atomistic images, spectra, and text. For ES, we consider multiple ES approaches, software packages, pseudopotentials, materials, and properties, comparing results to experiment. For FF, we compare multiple approaches for material property predictions. For QC, we benchmark Hamiltonian simulations using various quantum algorithms and circuits. Finally, for experiments, we use the inter-laboratory approach to establish benchmarks. There are 1281 contributions to 274 benchmarks using 152 methods with more than 8 million data-points, and the leaderboard is continuously expanding. The JARVIS-Leaderboard is available at the website: https://pages.nist.gov/jarvis_leaderboard

  • 38 authors
·
Jun 20, 2023

Efficient Implementation of Gaussian Process Regression Accelerated Saddle Point Searches with Application to Molecular Reactions

The task of locating first order saddle points on high-dimensional surfaces describing the variation of energy as a function of atomic coordinates is an essential step for identifying the mechanism and estimating the rate of thermally activated events within the harmonic approximation of transition state theory. When combined directly with electronic structure calculations, the number of energy and atomic force evaluations needed for convergence is a primary issue. Here, we describe an efficient implementation of Gaussian process regression (GPR) acceleration of the minimum mode following method where a dimer is used to estimate the lowest eigenmode of the Hessian. A surrogate energy surface is constructed and updated after each electronic structure calculation. The method is applied to a test set of 500 molecular reactions previously generated by Hermez and coworkers [J. Chem. Theory Comput. 18, 6974 (2022)]. An order of magnitude reduction in the number of electronic structure calculations needed to reach the saddle point configurations is obtained by using the GPR compared to the dimer method. Despite the wide range in stiffness of the molecular degrees of freedom, the calculations are carried out using Cartesian coordinates and are found to require similar number of electronic structure calculations as an elaborate internal coordinate method implemented in the Sella software package. The present implementation of the GPR surrogate model in C++ is efficient enough for the wall time of the saddle point searches to be reduced in 3 out of 4 cases even though the calculations are carried out at a low Hartree-Fock level.

  • 5 authors
·
May 18, 2025

Combining Electron-Phonon and Dynamical Mean-Field Theory Calculations of Correlated Materials: Transport in the Correlated Metal Sr_2RuO_4

Electron-electron (e-e) and electron-phonon (e-ph) interactions are challenging to describe in correlated materials, where their joint effects govern unconventional transport, phase transitions, and superconductivity. Here we combine first-principles e-ph calculations with dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) as a step toward a unified description of e-e and e-ph interactions in correlated materials. We compute the e-ph self-energy using the DMFT electron Green's function, and combine it with the e-e self-energy from DMFT to obtain a Green's function including both interactions. This approach captures the renormalization of quasiparticle dispersion and spectral weight on equal footing. Using our method, we study the e-ph and e-e contributions to the resistivity and spectral functions in the correlated metal Sr_2RuO_4. In this material, our results show that e-e interactions dominate transport and spectral broadening in the temperature range we study (50-310~K), while e-ph interactions are relatively weak and account for only sim10\% of the experimental resistivity. We also compute effective scattering rates, and find that the e-e interactions result in scattering several times greater than the Planckian value k_BT, whereas e-ph interactions are associated with scattering rates lower than k_BT. Our work demonstrates a first-principles approach to combine electron dynamical correlations from DMFT with e-ph interactions in a consistent way, advancing quantitative studies of correlated materials.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 13, 2023

Persistent homology of the cosmic web. I: Hierarchical topology in ΛCDM cosmologies

Using a set of LambdaCDM simulations of cosmic structure formation, we study the evolving connectivity and changing topological structure of the cosmic web using state-of-the-art tools of multiscale topological data analysis (TDA). We follow the development of the cosmic web topology in terms of the evolution of Betti number curves and feature persistence diagrams of the three (topological) classes of structural features: matter concentrations, filaments and tunnels, and voids. The Betti curves specify the prominence of features as a function of density level, and their evolution with cosmic epoch reflects the changing network connections between these structural features. The persistence diagrams quantify the longevity and stability of topological features. In this study we establish, for the first time, the link between persistence diagrams, the features they show, and the gravitationally driven cosmic structure formation process. By following the diagrams' development over cosmic time, the link between the multiscale topology of the cosmic web and the hierarchical buildup of cosmic structure is established. The sharp apexes in the diagrams are intimately related to key transitions in the structure formation process. The apex in the matter concentration diagrams coincides with the density level at which, typically, they detach from the Hubble expansion and begin to collapse. At that level many individual islands merge to form the network of the cosmic web and a large number of filaments and tunnels emerge to establish its connecting bridges. The location trends of the apex possess a self-similar character that can be related to the cosmic web's hierarchical buildup. We find that persistence diagrams provide a significantly higher and more profound level of information on the structure formation process than more global summary statistics like Euler characteristic or Betti numbers.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 25, 2020

A molecular Ferroelectric thin film of imidazolium perchlorate on Silicon

Molecular ferroelectric materials have attracted widespread attention due to their abundant chemical diversity, structural tunability, low synthesis temperature, and high flexibility. Meanwhile, the integration of molecular ferroelectric materials and Si is still challenging, while the fundamental understanding of the ferroelectric switching process is still lacking. Herein, we have successfully synthesized the imidazole perchlorate (ImClO4) single crystals and a series of high-quality highly-oriented thin films on a Si substrate. A high inverse piezoelectric coefficient (55.7 pm/V) is demonstrated for the thin films. Two types of domain bands can be observed (in the size of a few microns): type-I band tilts ~60{\deg} with respect to the horizontal axis, while the type-II band is perpendicular to the horizontal axis. Most of the domain walls (DWs) are 180{\deg} DWs for the two bands, while some 109{\deg} DWs can also be observed. Interestingly, the DWs in type-I band are curved, charged domain walls; while the 180{\deg} DWs in type-II band are straight, noncharged domain walls. After applying +20 V for 5 s through a PFM tip, the 180{\deg} DWs in type-I band shrink first, then disconnect from the band boundary, forming a needle-like domain with a size of ~100 nm. The needle-like domain will extend toward the band boundary after an inverse bias is applied (-20 V), and expand along the band boundary after touching the boundary. Whereas for the type-II domain band, the 180{\deg} DWs are more mobile than the 109{\deg} domain walls, which displaces ~500 nm after applying +20 V. While such displacement is much shorter after the application of a negative bias for the same duration, starting from the positively poled sample. We hope to spur further interest in the on-chip design of the molecular ferroelectrics based electronic devices.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 30, 2023

Flat borophene films as anode materials for Mg, Na or Li-ion batteries with ultra high capacities: A first-principles study

Most recent exciting experimental advances introduced buckled and flat borophene nanomembranes as new members to the advancing family of two-dimensional (2D) materials. Borophene, is the boron atom analogue of graphene with interesting properties suitable for a wide variety of applications. In this investigation, we conducted extensive first-principles density functional theory simulations to explore the application of four different flat borophene films as anode materials for Al, Mg, Na or Li-ion batteries. In our modelling, first the strongest binding sites were predicted and next we gradually increased the adatoms coverage until the maximum capacity was reached. Bader charge analysis was employed to evaluate the charge transfer between the adatoms and the borophene films. Nudged elastic band method was also utilized to probe the ions diffusions. We calculated the average atom adsorption energies and open-circuit voltage profiles as a function of adatoms coverage. Our findings propose the flat borophene films as electrically conductive and thermally stable anode materials with ultra high capacities of 2480 mAh/g, 1640 mAh/g and 2040 mAh/g for Mg, Na or Li-ion batteries, respectively, which distinctly outperform not only the buckled borophene but also all other 2D materials. Our study may provide useful viewpoint with respect to the possible application of flat borophene films for the design of high capacity and light weight advanced rechargeable ion batteries.

  • 4 authors
·
May 6, 2017

Molecule3D: A Benchmark for Predicting 3D Geometries from Molecular Graphs

Graph neural networks are emerging as promising methods for modeling molecular graphs, in which nodes and edges correspond to atoms and chemical bonds, respectively. Recent studies show that when 3D molecular geometries, such as bond lengths and angles, are available, molecular property prediction tasks can be made more accurate. However, computing of 3D molecular geometries requires quantum calculations that are computationally prohibitive. For example, accurate calculation of 3D geometries of a small molecule requires hours of computing time using density functional theory (DFT). Here, we propose to predict the ground-state 3D geometries from molecular graphs using machine learning methods. To make this feasible, we develop a benchmark, known as Molecule3D, that includes a dataset with precise ground-state geometries of approximately 4 million molecules derived from DFT. We also provide a set of software tools for data processing, splitting, training, and evaluation, etc. Specifically, we propose to assess the error and validity of predicted geometries using four metrics. We implement two baseline methods that either predict the pairwise distance between atoms or atom coordinates in 3D space. Experimental results show that, compared with generating 3D geometries with RDKit, our method can achieve comparable prediction accuracy but with much smaller computational costs. Our Molecule3D is available as a module of the MoleculeX software library (https://github.com/divelab/MoleculeX).

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 30, 2021

OrbNet Denali: A machine learning potential for biological and organic chemistry with semi-empirical cost and DFT accuracy

We present OrbNet Denali, a machine learning model for electronic structure that is designed as a drop-in replacement for ground-state density functional theory (DFT) energy calculations. The model is a message-passing neural network that uses symmetry-adapted atomic orbital features from a low-cost quantum calculation to predict the energy of a molecule. OrbNet Denali is trained on a vast dataset of 2.3 million DFT calculations on molecules and geometries. This dataset covers the most common elements in bio- and organic chemistry (H, Li, B, C, N, O, F, Na, Mg, Si, P, S, Cl, K, Ca, Br, I) as well as charged molecules. OrbNet Denali is demonstrated on several well-established benchmark datasets, and we find that it provides accuracy that is on par with modern DFT methods while offering a speedup of up to three orders of magnitude. For the GMTKN55 benchmark set, OrbNet Denali achieves WTMAD-1 and WTMAD-2 scores of 7.19 and 9.84, on par with modern DFT functionals. For several GMTKN55 subsets, which contain chemical problems that are not present in the training set, OrbNet Denali produces a mean absolute error comparable to those of DFT methods. For the Hutchison conformers benchmark set, OrbNet Denali has a median correlation coefficient of R^2=0.90 compared to the reference DLPNO-CCSD(T) calculation, and R^2=0.97 compared to the method used to generate the training data (wB97X-D3/def2-TZVP), exceeding the performance of any other method with a similar cost. Similarly, the model reaches chemical accuracy for non-covalent interactions in the S66x10 dataset. For torsional profiles, OrbNet Denali reproduces the torsion profiles of wB97X-D3/def2-TZVP with an average MAE of 0.12 kcal/mol for the potential energy surfaces of the diverse fragments in the TorsionNet500 dataset.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 1, 2021

Pruning-based Topology Refinement of 3D Mesh using a 2D Alpha Mask

Image-based 3D reconstruction has increasingly stunning results over the past few years with the latest improvements in computer vision and graphics. Geometry and topology are two fundamental concepts when dealing with 3D mesh structures. But the latest often remains a side issue in the 3D mesh-based reconstruction literature. Indeed, performing per-vertex elementary displacements over a 3D sphere mesh only impacts its geometry and leaves the topological structure unchanged and fixed. Whereas few attempts propose to update the geometry and the topology, all need to lean on costly 3D ground-truth to determine the faces/edges to prune. We present in this work a method that aims to refine the topology of any 3D mesh through a face-pruning strategy that extensively relies upon 2D alpha masks and camera pose information. Our solution leverages a differentiable renderer that renders each face as a 2D soft map. Its pixel intensity reflects the probability of being covered during the rendering process by such a face. Based on the 2D soft-masks available, our method is thus able to quickly highlight all the incorrectly rendered faces for a given viewpoint. Because our module is agnostic to the network that produces the 3D mesh, it can be easily plugged into any self-supervised image-based (either synthetic or natural) 3D reconstruction pipeline to get complex meshes with a non-spherical topology.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 17, 2022

A Topological Perspective on Demystifying GNN-Based Link Prediction Performance

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great promise in learning node embeddings for link prediction (LP). While numerous studies aim to improve the overall LP performance of GNNs, none have explored its varying performance across different nodes and its underlying reasons. To this end, we aim to demystify which nodes will perform better from the perspective of their local topology. Despite the widespread belief that low-degree nodes exhibit poorer LP performance, our empirical findings provide nuances to this viewpoint and prompt us to propose a better metric, Topological Concentration (TC), based on the intersection of the local subgraph of each node with the ones of its neighbors. We empirically demonstrate that TC has a higher correlation with LP performance than other node-level topological metrics like degree and subgraph density, offering a better way to identify low-performing nodes than using cold-start. With TC, we discover a novel topological distribution shift issue in which newly joined neighbors of a node tend to become less interactive with that node's existing neighbors, compromising the generalizability of node embeddings for LP at testing time. To make the computation of TC scalable, We further propose Approximated Topological Concentration (ATC) and theoretically/empirically justify its efficacy in approximating TC and reducing the computation complexity. Given the positive correlation between node TC and its LP performance, we explore the potential of boosting LP performance via enhancing TC by re-weighting edges in the message-passing and discuss its effectiveness with limitations. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YuWVandy/Topo_LP_GNN.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 6, 2023