Transferable, Living Data Sets for Predicting Global Minimum Energy Nanocluster Geometries

Modeling of nanocluster geometries is essential for studying the dependence of catalytic activity on the available active sites. In heterogeneous catalysis, the interfacial interaction of the support with the metal can result in modification of the structural and electronic properties of the clusters. To tackle the study of a diverse array of cluster shapes, data-driven methodologies are essential to circumvent prohibitive computational costs. At their core, these methods require large data sets in order to achieve the necessary accuracy to drive structural exploration. Given the similarity in binding character of the transition metals, cluster shapes encountered for various systems show a large amount of overlap. This overlap has been utilized to construct a living data set which may be carried over across multiple studies. Iterative refinement of this data set provides a low-cost pathway for initialization of cluster studies. It is shown that utilization of transferable structural information can reduce model construction costs by more than 90%. The benefits of this approach are particularly notable for alloy systems, which possess significantly larger configurational spaces compared to the pure-phase counterparts.