Ternary half-Heusler compounds with widely tunable electronic structures, present a new platform to discover topological insulators. Due to time-consuming computations and synthesis procedures, the identification of new topological insulators is however a rough task. Here, we adopt a compressed-sensing approach to rapidly screen potential topological insulators in half-Heusler family, which is realized via a two-dimensional descriptor that only depends on the fundamental properties of the constituent atoms. Beyond the finite training data, the proposed descriptor is employed to screen many new half-Heusler compounds, including those with integer and fractional stoichiometry, and a larger number of possible topological insulators are predicted.
@article{arxiv.1808.04748,
title = {Screening potential topological insulators in half-Heusler compounds via compressed-sensing},
author = {Jianghui Liu and Guohua Cao and Zizhen Zhou and Huijun Liu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.04748},
year = {2020}
}