Modeling LiF and FLiBe Molten Salts with Robust Neural Network Interatomic Potentials

Lithium-based molten salts have attracted significant attention due to their applications in energy storage, advanced fission reactors and fusion devices. Lithium fluorides and particularly 66.6%LiF-33.3¾F₂ (Flibe) are of considerable interest in nuclear systems, as they show an excellent combination of desirable heat-transfer and neutron-absorption characteristics. For nuclear salts, the range of possible local structures, compositions, and thermodynamic conditions presents significant challenges in atomistic modeling. In this work, we demonstrate that atom-centered neural network interatomic potentials (NNIP) provide a fast and accurate method for performing molecular dynamics of molten salts. For LiF, these potentials are able to accurately model dimer interactions, crystalline solids under deformation, semi-crystalline LiF near the melting point and liquid LiF at high temperatures. For Flibe, NNIPs accurately predicts the structures and dynamics at normal operating conditions, high temperature-pressure conditions, and in the crystalline solid phase. Furthermore, we show that NNIP-based molecular dynamics of molten salts are scalable to reach long timescales (e.g., nanosecond) and large system sizes (e.g., 10⁵ atoms), while maintaining ab initio accuracy and providing more than three orders of magnitude of computational speedup for calculating structure and transport properties.