Rapid Detection of Strong Correlation with Machine Learning for Transition Metal Complex High-Throughput Screening

27 July 2020, Version 2
This content is a preprint and has not undergone peer review at the time of posting.

Abstract

Despite its widespread use in chemical discovery, approximate density functional theory (DFT) is poorly suited to many targets, such as those containing open-shell, 3d transition metals that can be expected to have strong multi-reference (MR) character. For discovery workflows to be predictive, we need automated, low-cost methods that can distinguish the regions of chemical space where DFT should be applied from those where it should not. We curate over 4,800 open-shell transition-metal complexes up to hundreds of atoms in size from prior high-throughput DFT studies and evaluate affordable, finite-temperature DFT evaluation of fractional occupation number (FON)-based MR diagnostics. We show that intuitive measures of strong correlation (i.e., the HOMO–LUMO gap) are not predictive of MR character as judged by FON-based diagnostics. Analysis of independently trained machine learning (ML) models to predict HOMO–LUMO gaps and FON-based diagnostics reveals differences in metal- and ligand-sensitivity of the two quantities. We use our trained ML models to rapidly evaluate MR character over a space of ca. 187,000 theoretical complexes, identifying large-scale trends in spin-state-dependent MR character and finding small HOMO–LUMO gap complexes while ensuring low MR character.

Keywords

machine learning
multireference character
electronic structure
strong correlation
transition metal chemistry
finite-temperature DFT
density functional theory

Supplementary materials

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A MRML3
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SI MRML3 v8
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SI MRML3 Data-07242020
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