Stable and metastable rare-earth-free permanent magnets from a database of predicted crystal structures

With the recent developments in crystal structure prediction, databases of new (not previously synthesized) materials are being created. One of these databases contains more than a million entries with the distance to the Convex Hull predicted by crystal-graph attention networks. Hence, stable and metastable materials can be extracted and then investigated for any desired properties. A high-throughput and data-mining approach we previously developed to search for rare-earth-free permanent magnets was applied to these compounds. As a result, four promising candidates for novel rare-earth-free permanent magnets were discovered with high magnetization, high uniaxial magnetocrystalline anisotropy, and high Curie temperature - Ta3ZnFe8, AlFe2, Co3Ni2, and Fe3Ge. The materials were investigated in more detail and all were verified to be dynamically stable.