Predicting the synthesizability of crystalline inorganic materials from the data of known material compositions

Reliably identifying synthesizable inorganic crystalline materials is an unsolved challenge required for realizing autonomous materials discovery. In this work, we develop a deep learning synthesizability model (SynthNN) that leverages the entire space of synthesized inorganic chemical compositions. By reformulating material discovery as a synthesizability classification task, SynthNN identifies synthesizable materials with 7× higher precision than with DFT-calculated formation energies. In a head-to-head material discovery comparison against 20 expert material scientists, SynthNN outperforms all experts, achieves 1.5× higher precision and completes the task five orders of magnitude faster than the best human expert. Remarkably, without any prior chemical knowledge, our experiments indicate that SynthNN learns the chemical principles of charge-balancing, chemical family relationships and ionicity, and utilizes these principles to generate synthesizability predictions. The development of SynthNN will allow for synthesizability constraints to be seamlessly integrated into computational material screening workflows to increase their reliability for identifying synthetically accessible materials.

Evan R. Antoniuk, Gowoon Cheon, George Wang, Daniel Bernstein, William Cai, Evan J. Reed