Flow Matching for Accelerated Simulation of Atomic Transport in Crystalline Materials

2025-10-20 19:00 GMT · 6 months ago aimagpro.com

arXiv:2410.01464v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Atomic transport underpins the performance of materials in technologies such as energy storage and electronics, yet its simulation remains computationally demanding. In particular, modeling ionic diffusion in solid-state electrolytes (SSEs) requires methods that can overcome the scale limitations of traditional ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD). We introduce LiFlow, a generative framework to accelerate MD simulations for crystalline materials that formulates the task as conditional generation of atomic displacements. The model uses flow matching, with a Propagator submodel to generate atomic displacements and a Corrector to locally correct unphysical geometries, and incorporates an adaptive prior based on the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution to account for chemical and thermal conditions. We benchmark LiFlow on a dataset comprising 25-ps trajectories of lithium diffusion across 4,186 SSE candidates at four temperatures. The model obtains a consistent Spearman rank correlation of 0.7-0.8 for lithium mean squared displacement (MSD) predictions on unseen compositions. Furthermore, LiFlow generalizes from short training trajectories to larger supercells and longer simulations while maintaining high accuracy. With speed-ups of up to 600,000$times$ compared to first-principles methods, LiFlow enables scalable simulations at significantly larger length and time scales.