Crystal Structure Assignment for Unknown Compounds from X-ray Diffraction Patterns with Deep Learning

Determining the structures of previously unseen compounds from experimental characterizations is a crucial part of materials science. It requires a step of searching for the structure type that conforms to the lattice of the unknown compound, which enables the pattern matching process for characterization data, such as X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns. However, this procedure typically places a high demand on domain expertise, thus creating an obstacle for computer-driven automation. Here, we address this challenge by leveraging a deep-learning model composed of a union of convolutional residual neural networks. The accuracy of the model is demonstrated on a dataset of over 60,000 different compounds for 100 structure types, and additional categories can be integrated without the need to retrain the existing networks. We also unravel the operation of the deep-learning black box and highlight the way in which the resemblance between the unknown compound and a structure type is quantified based on both local and global characteristics in XRD patterns. This computational tool opens new avenues for automating structure analysis on materials unearthed in high-throughput experimentation.