The geometric blueprint of perovskites

Significance Perovskites constitute one of the most versatile and chemically diverse families of crystals. In perovskites the same structural template supports a staggering variety of properties, from metallic, insulating, and semiconducting behavior to superconducting, ferroelectric, ferromagnetic, and multiferroic phases. Approximately 2,000 perovskites are currently known. In this work we revisit the century-old model proposed by Goldschmidt to predict the formability of perovskites in the key of modern inferential statistics and internet data mining. We demonstrate that the nonrattling rule postulated by Goldschmidt can predict the stability of perovskites with a success rate of 80%. Using this tool we predict the existence of 90,000 hitherto unknown perovskites.