Solving Inorganic Crystal Structures from X-ray Powder Diffraction Using a Generative First-Principles Framework

22 March 2022, Version 1
This content is a preprint and has not undergone peer review at the time of posting.

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.

Keywords

XRD
structure solution
automated
software

Supplementary materials

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Supporting Information
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Analysis of R value metrics which utilize peak intensities vs those that use the full XRD pattern
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Benchmarking structures
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.json file with pymatgen structures corresponding to those structures used in the benchmarking portion of the paper
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Li3CrO4
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Lowest Li3CrO4 stucture found by AXS
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AXS Li3CrO4 Structures
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.zip containing .cif files of all Li3CrO4 structures relaxed by DFT
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Li8HfO6
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Lowest energy Li8HfO6 structure found by AXS
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AXS Li8HfO6 Structures
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.zip containing .cif files of all Li8HfO6 structures relaxed by DFT
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LiFeO2
Description
Lowest energy LiFeO2 structure found by AXS
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AXS Li8HfO6 Structures
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.zip containing .cif files of all LiFeO2 structures relaxed by DFT
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Supplementary weblinks

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