Machine Learning for Predicting Magnetization from X-ray Diffraction of Iron Oxide Nanoparticles Using Simple Physics-Based Data Generation

TL;DR

This paper develops machine learning models trained on simulated X-ray diffraction data to accurately predict the magnetization of iron oxide nanoparticles, facilitating rapid material property assessment from a single measurement.

Contribution

It introduces a physics-based data simulation approach combined with ML models to predict nanoparticle magnetization from XRD data, validated with experimental synthesis and measurements.

Findings

ML models achieved R^2 > 0.9 on experimental samples

Models accurately predict maximum magnetization at high magnetic fields

RF model performs well on full magnetization curves

Abstract

Automation and high-throughput characterization and synthesis for material development are becoming increasingly common; these approaches require machine learning (ML) tools to assess material properties, ideally based on a single measurement. Here, ML models are developed to predict magnetization from X-ray diffraction (XRD) for iron oxide nanoparticles. Our approach is to first develop a set of simulated data that links modulated XRD, based on a crystallographic information file (CIF), to a simple magnetic model to determine magnetization at a given magnetic field, thereby enabling us to train Random Forest and Gradient Boosting regression models on a large amount of simulated data. The models are validated by synthesizing iron oxide nanoparticles and measuring their crystal structure via XRD and room-temperature magnetization curves. In doing so, we can fine-tune both the training hyperparameters and the optimal size of the simulated datasets used to train the models. Through this optimization, the best models can achieve an $R^2$ greater than 0.9 for five experimental samples, used for tuning, for predicting the max magnetization (at 2.8 T) of the measurement. Lastly, we demonstrate reasonable predictions on the full magnetization vs. magnetic field curve, showing that the RF model excels at predicting the high magnetic field values, which is key for determining the success of an iron oxide nanoparticle synthesis for applications like magnetic particle imaging (MPI), thermal magnetic particle imaging (T-MPI), and hyperthermia.