Frontiers in Physics (Feb 2022)

Physics in the Machine: Integrating Physical Knowledge in Autonomous Phase-Mapping

  • A. Gilad Kusne,
  • A. Gilad Kusne,
  • Austin McDannald,
  • Brian DeCost,
  • Corey Oses,
  • Cormac Toher,
  • Stefano Curtarolo,
  • Apurva Mehta,
  • Ichiro Takeuchi,
  • Ichiro Takeuchi

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2022.815863
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10

Abstract

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Application of artificial intelligence (AI), and more specifically machine learning, to the physical sciences has expanded significantly over the past decades. In particular, science-informed AI, also known as scientific AI or inductive bias AI, has grown from a focus on data analysis to now controlling experiment design, simulation, execution and analysis in closed-loop autonomous systems. The CAMEO (closed-loop autonomous materials exploration and optimization) algorithm employs scientific AI to address two tasks: learning a material system’s composition-structure relationship and identifying materials compositions with optimal functional properties. By integrating these, accelerated materials screening across compositional phase diagrams was demonstrated, resulting in the discovery of a best-in-class phase change memory material. Key to this success is the ability to guide subsequent measurements to maximize knowledge of the composition-structure relationship, or phase map. In this work we investigate the benefits of incorporating varying levels of prior physical knowledge into CAMEO’s autonomous phase-mapping. This includes the use of ab-initio phase boundary data from the AFLOW repositories, which has been shown to optimize CAMEO’s search when used as a prior.

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