Towards "on-demand" van der Waals epitaxy with adaptive ensemble sampling atomistic workflows

Abstract

Traditional approaches to achieve targeted epitaxial growth involves exploring a vast parameter space of thermodynamical and kinetic drivers (e.g., temperature, pressure, chemical potential etc). This tedious and time-consuming approach becomes particularly cumbersome to accelerate synthesis and characterization of novel materials with complex dependencies on local chemical environment, temperature and lattice-strains, specifically nanoscale heterostructures of layered 2D materials. We combine the strength of next generation supercomputers at the extreme scale, machine learning and classical molecular dynamics simulations within an adaptive real time closed-loop virtual environment steered by Bayesian optimization to enable asynchronous ensemble sampling of the synthesis space, and apply it to the recrystallization phenomena of amorphous transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) bilayer to form stack moiré heterostructures under various growth parameters. We show that such asynchronous ensemble sampling frameworks for materials simulations can be promising towards achieving on-demand epitaxy of van der Waals stacked moiré devices, paving the way towards a robust autonomous materials synthesis pipeline to enable unprecedented discovery of new functionalities.