Bridging the Synthesizability Gap in Perovskites by Combining Computations, Literature Data, and PU Learning

Abstract: Among emerging energy materials, halide and chalcogenide perovskites have garnered significant attention over the last decade owing to the abundance of their constituent species, low manufacturing costs, and their highly tunable composition-structure-property space. Navigating the vast perovskite compositional landscape is possible using density functional theory (DFT) computations, but they are not easily extended to predictions of the synthesizability of new materials and their properties. As a result, only a limited number of compositions identified to have desirable optoelectronic properties from these calculations have been realized experimentally. One way to bridge this gap is by learning from the experimental literature about how the perovskite composition-structure space relates to their likelihood of laboratory synthesis. Here, we present our efforts in combining high-throughput DFT data with experimental labels collected from the literature to train classifier models employing various materials descriptors to forecast the synthesizability of any given perovskite compound. Our framework utilizes the positive and unlabeled (PU) learning strategy and makes probabilistic estimates of the synthesis likelihood based on DFT- computed energies and the prior existence of similar synthesized compounds. Our data and models can be readily accessed via a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reproducible (FAIR) nanoHUB tool.