Lowering the exponential wall: accelerating high-entropy alloy catalysts screening using local surface energy descriptors from neural network potentials

Abstract

Computational screening is indispensable for the efficient design of high-entropy alloys (HEAs), which hold considerable potential for catalytic applications. However, the chemical space of HEAs is exponentially vast with respect to the number of constituent elements, making even machine learning-based screening calculations time-intensive. To address this challenge, we propose a rapid method for predicting HEA properties using data from monometallic systems (or few-component alloys). Central to our approach is the newly introduced local surface energy (LSE) descriptor, which captures local surface reactivity at atomic resolution. We established a correlation between LSE and adsorption energies using monometallic systems. Using this correlation in a linear regression model, we successfully estimated molecular adsorption energies on HEAs with significantly higher accuracy than a conventional descriptor (i.e., generalized coordination numbers). Furthermore, we developed high-precision models by employing both classical and quantum machine learning. Our method enabled CO adsorption-energy calculations for 1000 quinary nanoparticles, comprising 201 atoms each, within a few days, considerably faster than density functional theory, which would require hundreds of years or neural network potentials, which would have taken hundreds of days. The proposed approach accelerates the exploration of the vast HEA chemical space, facilitating the design of novel catalysts.