Inverse Design of Solid-State Materials via a Continuous Representation

The non-serendipitous discovery of materials with targeted properties is the ultimate goal of materials research, but to date, materials design lacks the incorporation of all available knowledge to plan the synthesis of the next material. This work presents a framework for learning a continuous representation of materials and building a model for new discovery using latent space representation. The ability of autoencoders to generate experimental materials is demonstrated with vanadium oxides via rediscovery of experimentally known structures when the model was trained without them. Approximately 20,000 hypothetical materials are generated, leading to several completely new metastable V_xO_y materials that may be synthesizable. Comparison with genetic algorithms suggests computational efficiency of generative models that can explore chemical compositional space effectively by learning the distributions of known materials for crystal structure prediction. These results are an important step toward machine-learned inverse design of inorganic functional materials using generative models.