Carla Verdi: Thermodynamic Properties of Zirconia from Machine Learning within and beyond DFT

Carla Verdi: "Thermodynamic Properties of Zirconia from Machine Learning within and beyond DFT"

The discussion starts at 25:40.

The first-principles description of the properties of multi-component metal oxides is an exceedingly challenging problem. The reasons are that the configurational space grows exponentially with the number of species and standard Density Functional Theory (DFT) is often not accurate enough. The long-term objective of P03 is to accelerate first-principles calculations by developing machine-learning approaches for the description of the interatomic forces, Born effective charges, and other tensorial properties of multivalent oxides. The project will rely on kernel-based methods and Bayesian inference to implement fully automatic “on-the-fly” learning.
In the first project period, we will develop machine-learned force fields (MLFF) for DFT and DFT+U, whereby the number of components in the FF will be gradually increased. A concise framework for learning tensorial properties will be implemented. We will use this to simulate infrared spectra of oxide materials, which can be readily compared to the finite-temperature spectra measured by the experimental groups.
The difference between DFT and hybrid functionals will be machine-learned to go beyond semi-local functionals (Delta-learning). The long-term perspective is to extend this approach to highly accurate beyond-DFT methods, such as the random phase approximation and quantum chemistry (coupled-cluster) methods. Although kernel-based methods are exceedingly accurate, they are often less efficient than NN. We will collaborate with other projects to recast the on-the-fly trained FF into NN potentials to address this issue.

The talk was given at the TACO Kick-off Meeting in Vienna on September 28, 2021. You can find more information about the TACO project at https://sfb-taco.at/ and about Carla's subproject at https://sfb-taco.at/consortium/p03/.