Composition/structure directed search for new chalcogenide compounds

Abstract

This work presents a simple scheme for finding new crystalline compounds by adapting structure types from neighbor atoms compounds. The approach is demonstrated for the selenide and sulfide families of binary compounds. It predicts ten new compounds that are not currently included in the inorganic crystal structure database (ICSD). The compounds primarily originated from a small search domain that includes near neighbors. Comparison with extended searches that include structures from binary systems of more remote atoms in the periodic table demonstrate the relative efficiency of near neighbor screening. This points at the possibility of using similar directed searches as a heuristic rule for efficiently finding new stable compounds in additional compound families.