Machine learning assisted high throughput prediction of moir\'e materials

TL;DR

This paper introduces a machine learning approach to efficiently predict electronic properties of twisted bilayer 2D materials at low angles, enabling high throughput discovery of new twistable candidates with interesting physics.

Contribution

It presents a novel ML-based methodology for estimating twisted interlayer tunneling and density of states, significantly reducing computational costs for large moiré superlattices.

Findings

Successfully resolves the magic angle DOS in twisted bilayer graphene.

Identifies new twistable 2D monolayer candidates with high DOS near the Fermi energy.

Demonstrates substantial computational time reduction in predicting electronic properties.

Abstract

The world of 2D materials is rapidly expanding with new discoveries of stackable and twistable layered systems composed of lattices of different symmetries, orbital character, and structural motifs. Often, however, it is not clear a priori whether a pair of monolayers twisted at a small angle will exhibit correlated or interaction-driven phenomena. The computational cost to make accurate predictions of the single particle states is significant, as small twists require very large unit cells, easily encompassing 10,000 atoms, and therefore implementing a high throughput prediction has been out of reach. Here we show a path to overcome this challenge by introducing a machine learning (ML) based methodology that efficiently estimates the twisted interlayer tunneling at arbitrarily low twist angles through the local-configuration based approach that enables interpolating the local stacking for a range of twist angles using a random forest regression algorithm. We leverage the kernel polynomial method to compute the density of states (DOS) on large real space graphs by reconstructing a lattice model of the twisted bilayer with the ML fitted hoppings. For twisted bilayer graphene (TBG), we show the ability of the method to resolve the magic angle DOS at a substantial improvement in computational time. We use this new technique to scan through the database of stable 2D monolayers (MC2D) and reveal new twistable candidates across the five possible points groups in two-dimensions with a large DOS near the Fermi energy, with potentially exciting interacting physics to be probed in future experiments.