The screening of novel materials is an important topic in the field of materials science. Although traditional computational modeling, especially first-principles approaches, is a very useful and accurate tool to predict the properties of novel materials, it still demands extensive and expensive state-of-the-art computational resources. Additionally, they can be often extremely time consuming. We describe a time and resource-efficient machine learning approach to create a large dataset of structural properties of van der Waals layered structures. In particular, we focus on the interlayer energy and the elastic constant of layered materials composed of two different 2-dimensional (2D) structures, that are important for novel solid lubricant and super-lubricant materials. We show that machine learning models can recapitulate results of computationally expansive approaches (i.e. density functional theory) with high accuracy.
@article{arxiv.1911.11559,
title = {Impressive computational acceleration by using machine learning for 2-dimensional super-lubricant materials discovery},
author = {Marco Fronzi and Mutaz Abu Ghazaleh and Olexandr Isayev and David A. Winkler and Joe Shapter and Michael J. Ford},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.11559},
year = {2020}
}