Abstract
X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) is a powerful structure characterization technique, but solving unknown inorganic crystal structures from powder diffraction patterns can often be labor-intensive or speculative. We introduce an Automated XRD to Structure (AXS) solution method based on the crystal symmetry obtained from XRD patterns, an efficient search of candidate structures spanning the available degrees of freedom, and density functional theory (DFT). This methodology is completely agnostic to structural prototypes and robust in solving inorganic structures of various chemistries, crystal systems, and unit cell sizes; 92% of all crystal structures were accurately determined from the simulated XRD patterns in our benchmark set. In addition, we demonstrate the efficacy of this methodology on experimental XRD patterns by solving the crystal structures of Li8HfO6, Li3CrO4, and LiFeO2.
Supplementary materials
Title
Supporting Information
Description
Analysis of R value metrics which utilize peak intensities vs those that use the full XRD pattern
Actions
Title
Benchmarking structures
Description
.json file with pymatgen structures corresponding to those structures used in the benchmarking portion of the paper
Actions
Title
Li3CrO4
Description
Lowest Li3CrO4 stucture found by AXS
Actions
Title
AXS Li3CrO4 Structures
Description
.zip containing .cif files of all Li3CrO4 structures relaxed by DFT
Actions
Title
Li8HfO6
Description
Lowest energy Li8HfO6 structure found by AXS
Actions
Title
AXS Li8HfO6 Structures
Description
.zip containing .cif files of all Li8HfO6 structures relaxed by DFT
Actions
Title
LiFeO2
Description
Lowest energy LiFeO2 structure found by AXS
Actions
Title
AXS Li8HfO6 Structures
Description
.zip containing .cif files of all LiFeO2 structures relaxed by DFT
Actions
Supplementary weblinks
Title
AXS Codebase
Description
Github repository of code for AXS as well as example notebooks of use
Actions
View