First-Principles Prediction of Electronic Transport in Experimental Semiconductor Heterostructures via Physics-Based Machine Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces an electronic-transport-informatics framework that leverages machine learning trained on first-principles models to predict transport properties of semiconductor heterostructures beyond traditional computational limits, matching experimental data.

Contribution

It presents a novel ML-based approach for predicting electronic transport in heterostructures, extending first-principles methods to larger systems and capturing fabrication variability effects.

Findings

Accurately predicts thermopower of silicon/germanium heterostructures.

Matches experimental measurements beyond first-principles length scales.

Extracts key physics governing electronic transport in complex materials.

Abstract

First-principles techniques for electronic transport property prediction have seen rapid progress in recent years. However, it remains a challenge to model heterostructures incorporating variability due to fabrication processes. Machine-learning (ML)-based materials informatics approaches (MI) are increasingly used to accelerate design and discovery of new materials with targeted properties, and extend the applicability of first-principles techniques to larger systems. However, few studies exploited MI to learn electronic structure properties and use the knowledge to predict the respective transport coefficients. In this work, we propose an electronic-transport-informatics (ETI) framework that trains on ab initio models of small systems and predicts thermopower of silicon/germanium heterostructures beyond the length-scale accessible with first-principles techniques, matching measured data. We demonstrate application of MI to extract important physics that determines electronic transport in semiconductor heterostructures, breaking from combinatorial strategies pursued especially for thermoelectric materials. We anticipate that ETI would have broad applicability to diverse materials classes.