Botti-Marques research group
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beautifulmaterials.bsky.social
Botti-Marques research group
@beautifulmaterials.bsky.social
First principles & AI for materials discovery
Ruhr University Bochum, ICAMS
RC-FEMS
✅ 8 Semiregular (Archimedean) Tilings – Combining two or more polygons while maintaining uniformity—each vertex has the same surroundings!

These patterns are key to geometry, architecture, and—most importantly for us—materials science! 🏗️🔬

#3DPrinting #MaterialsScience
February 25, 2025 at 1:53 PM
🌍 What’s next?
Many applications:
- Expanding the Alexandria database 🏛️
- Designing materials with tailored properties 🔬
- Accelerating breakthroughs in energy storage & semiconductors

We’re just getting started!
January 28, 2025 at 3:16 PM
🏆 Results we’re proud of:
- 8x more likely to generate stable structures than baselines (e.g., PyXtal with charge compensation)
- Fast: 1,000 novel structures/min ⚡
- Control over space group, composition, and stability
- Releasing 3 million compounds generated by the model 📥
January 28, 2025 at 3:16 PM
💡 What makes it unique?
- Fully leverages Wyckoff positions (discrete + continuous parameters)
- Trained across the periodic table & 230 space groups
- Condition on critical properties like stability
January 28, 2025 at 3:16 PM
🧪 Why this matters:
Materials are the foundation of modern technology—fueling everything from batteries to semiconductors.

However, generating stable 3D structures near the convex hull is challenging:

- Efficiency ⚡
- Symmetry ⚖️
- Stability 🏔️

Matra-Genoa adresses these challenges.
January 28, 2025 at 3:16 PM
These compact stackings aren’t just for atoms—next time you see stacked oranges in a store, think crystallography! 🧠💡
January 17, 2025 at 9:38 AM
Face-Centered Cubic (FCC, the golden structure in tic-tac-toe above):
 A cube with atoms on its faces. Look closely—it’s also alternating hexagon layers (A-B-C-A-B-C), filling ~74% space! ✨
Elements: Au, Cu, Al, etc.
January 17, 2025 at 9:38 AM
Hexagonal Close-Packed (HCP): 
Layers of hexagons stacked A-B-A-B. Efficiently fills ~74% of space.
Elements: Mg, Ti, Zn, etc.
January 17, 2025 at 9:38 AM
Body-Centered Cubic (BCC, the silver structure in tic-tac-toe above):
 A cube with an atom at its center. Simple but not most space-efficient (~52%). 🧊
Elements: Fe, Na, Cr, etc.
January 17, 2025 at 9:38 AM
You’re absolutely right—we’ve been a bit too quick with the labeling. We’ll revise it for the next version. Thank you for pointing this out!
December 29, 2024 at 7:26 PM
To the best of our knowledge, such systems are not included in the training set. Additionally, phonons or force constants are not used as training targets. Finally, results for most uMLIPs are not that good
December 29, 2024 at 7:25 PM
Good point, it’s true that the training set for all the uMLIPs includes the primitive unit cell of these compounds. However, when calculating phonons, we use supercells containing approximately 200 atoms with slightly displaced positions.
December 29, 2024 at 7:25 PM
5/5
🔑 Key takeaway: uMLIPs are ready for production use in phonon calculations! But choose wisely - not all models performing well on standard benchmarks will give you accurate phonon properties. Training data & architecture choices matter more than model complexity.
December 24, 2024 at 3:47 PM
4/5
📊 The tested models fall into 3 clear tiers:
- Tier 1: MatterSim (excellent)
- Tier 2: SevenNet, MACE, CHGNet, M3GNet (good)
- Tier 3: ORB, OMat24 (needs work for phonons)
December 24, 2024 at 3:47 PM
3/5
⚠️ Surprising finding: ORB & OMat24 excel at geometry optimization but struggle with phonons. Why? They predict forces directly instead of deriving them from energy gradients. This leads to issues with the small atomic displacements needed for phonon calculations.
December 24, 2024 at 3:47 PM
2/5
🎯 Most accurate model? MatterSim steals the show for phonon predictions! It achieves errors even smaller than the difference between PBE & PBEsol functionals. What's interesting is it outperforms more complex equivariant networks while being based on simpler M3GNet architecture.
December 24, 2024 at 3:47 PM
5/5
🔑 Key takeaway: uMLIPs are ready for production use in phonon calculations! But choose wisely - not all models performing well on standard benchmarks will give you accurate phonon properties. Training data & architecture choices matter more than model complexity.
December 24, 2024 at 3:42 PM
3/5
⚠️ Surprising finding: ORB & OMat24 excel at geometry optimization but struggle with phonons. Why? They predict forces directly instead of deriving them from energy gradients. This leads to issues with the small atomic displacements needed for phonon calculations.
December 24, 2024 at 3:42 PM
2/5
🎯 Most accurate model? MatterSim steals the show for phonon predictions! It achieves errors even smaller than the difference between PBE & PBEsol functionals. What's interesting is it outperforms more complex equivariant networks while being based on simpler M3GNet architecture.
December 24, 2024 at 3:42 PM