SymmCD: Symmetry-Preserving Crystal Generation with Diffusion Models
Daniel Levy Siba Smarak Panigrahi Sékou-Oumar Kaba Qiang Zhu Kin Long Kelvin Lee Mikhail Galkin Santiago Miret Siamak Ravanbakhsh
Generating novel crystalline materials has potential to lead to advancements in fields such as electronics, energy storage, and catalysis. The defining characteristic of crystals is their symmetry, which plays a central role in determining their physical properties. However, existing crystal generation methods either fail to generate materials that display the symmetries of real-world crystals, or simply replicate the symmetry information from examples in a database.  To address this limitation, we propose SymmCD, a novel diffusion-based generative model that explicitly incorporates crystallographic symmetry into the generative process. We decompose crystals into two components and learn their joint distribution through diffusion: 1) the asymmetric unit, the smallest subset of the crystal  which can generate the whole crystal through symmetry transformations, and; 2) the symmetry transformations needed to be applied to each atom in the asymmetric unit. We also use a novel and interpretable representation for these transformations, enabling generalization across different crystallographic symmetry groups. We showcase the competitive performance of SymmCD on a subset of the Materials Project, obtaining diverse and valid crystals with realistic symmetries and predicted properties.
Crystals, Symmetry, Materials, Diffusion, Generative Models, Equivariance
We generate symmetric crystal structures by generating an asymmetric unit along with symmetry transformations