Wiwittawin
Sukmas
ab,
Annop
Ektarawong
*bc,
Prutthipong
Tsuppayakorn-aek
ab,
Björn
Alling
d,
Udomsilp
Pinsook
ab and
Thiti
Bovornratanaraks
*ab
aExtreme Conditions Physics Research Laboratory (ECPRL) and Physics of Energy Materials Research Unit (PEMRU), Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand. E-mail: thiti.b@chula.ac.th
bThailand Center of Excellence in Physics, Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation, 328 Si Ayutthaya Road, Bangkok 10400, Thailand
cChula Intelligent and Complex Systems (CHICS), Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand. E-mail: annop.e@chula.ac.th
dTheoretical Physics Division, Department of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology (IFM), Linköping University, Linköping, SE-581 83, Sweden
First published on 19th February 2021
Lead-free hybrid organic–inorganic perovskites have recently emerged as excellent materials particularly in highly potential yet low-cost photovoltaic technologies. Calculations have previously suggested that CH3NH3BiSeI2 can be used as an alternative material for the highly studied CH3NH3PbI3 due to its eco-friendliness and comparable performance. Herein, with the aid of Euler angles, the interplay between the organic CH3NH3 (MA) cation and the inorganic BiSeI2 framework, obtained from first-principles calculations, is thoroughly scrutinised by means of the multidimensional total energy landscape. The highest peak of 17.9 meV per atom, protruding from the average plateau of 9 meV per atom within the four-dimensional topography, is equivalent to 208 K, the temperature at which the MA cations freely reorient. Moreover, the complexity of the angle–energy relationship is mitigated by exploiting a high-fidelity simulation based on deep learning. The deep artificial neural network of five hidden layers with 500 neurons, each fed by ten descriptors – three Euler angles and seven various bond lengths – predicts the total energies with an accuracy within the root mean square error of 0.39 ± 0.03 meV per atom for the test dataset. This novel statistical model in turn offers a tantalising promise to provide an accurate prediction of this material's energies, while diminishing the need for costly first-principles calculations.
One key factor that facilitates the high efficiency of halide perovskites is the use of lead (Pb). The commercial deployment of these halide perovskites, nevertheless, is inevitably limited by intrinsic instabilities, namely that these materials tend to degrade upon the presence of humidity11 and the toxicity due to the Pb content.12 To correct these inherent shortcomings, several works have been carried out by, for example, replacing Pb with Sn, yet the efficiencies achieved by the Sn-based materials have so far been in the shadow of Pb-based perovskites.13,14 Moreover, the distorted perovskite structures of chalcogenide perovskites, e.g. CaTiS3 and BaZrS3, were predicted to have optimal band gaps for making single-junction solar cells.15 There is no doubt that there are no alternative elements across the periodic table that, while maintaining band gaps within the optimal range for solar absorber application, can replace Pb.
An alternative strategy has successfully been shown to be promising, i.e., the cation-splitting approach. High-performance I–III–VI2 chalcopyrites of CuInSe2 or Cu(In,Ga)Se2, considered as derivatives of II–VI zinc blende structures, were simply constructed by splitting two 2+ cations into one 1+ and one 3+ cation, demonstrating nearly 20% efficiency.17 In addition, the kesterite structure of Cu2ZnSnSe4, designed as a novel quaternary semiconductor, was again created by splitting two 3+ cations into one 2+ and one 4+ cation.18 By doing so, cation-splitting, in which the crystal and chemical environment are largely preserved, results in materials with similar electronic and optical properties, and has also been exploited in perovskite oxides that show promising photovoltaic properties.19 Anion-splitting, on the other hand, has rarely been adopted for novel solar cell materials. Very recently, oxynitride perovskites of (Ca,Sr,Ba)TaO2N and PrTaON2 were synthesised with success and suggested as candidates for photocatalytic water splitting.20 When it comes to HOIPs, Bi3+ has been introduced to CH3NH3PbI3 or MAPI, thanks to its tendency of having a high dielectric constant with lone-pair cations.21 By adopting the anion-splitting approach, replacing one I with Se and Pb with Bi to satisfy the charge neutrality, the structural and electronic properties of environmentally-friendly CH3NH3BiSI2 and CH3NH3BiSeI2 perovskites were predicted,22 yielding optimal band gaps for solar absorbers as specified by the Shockley–Queisser detailed balance limit of efficiency.23
To this end, it is imperative to carefully inspect CH3NH3BiSeI2 perovskite, or MABiSeI hereafter, as a promising candidate for photovoltaic materials, in order to gain new insight into the sustainable development of such an eco-friendly solar cell. Never before has the interplay between the organic CH3NH3 (MA) cation and the inorganic framework of BiSeI2 been studied by means of total energy analysis. Therefore, the organic–inorganic linkage was thoroughly probed by applying an effective systematic method called Euler's rotations to the MA cation, occupying the cubo-octahedral cavity between the corner-sharing octahedra of BiSeI2, to determine the beyond-three-dimensional energy landscape. This was obtained from the total energies of the cubic MABiSeI, which were evaluated based on state-of-the-art density functional theory (DFT).24 And, due to the massive amount of generated data obtained by DFT, a reliable model is required to recognise the underlying relationships in the dataset, e.g., the total energies and the Euler angles. Deep artificial neural networks, being the quintessential deep learning models, offer the capability to create accurate models quickly and automatically.25 Herein, we use a deep neural network to develop a predictive model for the energy determinations of MABiSeI at various Eulerian-rotated orientations of the MA cation. This approach encourages a paradigm shift in this class of materials' energy calculations without fully employing computationally demanding DFT calculations.
The Pmm structure of MABiSeI, illustrated in Fig. 1(a) with a lattice constant of 6.28 Å,22 was precisely selected as an input for the entire calculation. The initial alignment of the MA cation was selected so that the N–C direction, denoted as the N vector, points to the centre of a cubic face (a-axis). A rigid rotation (Euler’s rotation) was applied to this starting cationic orientation, referred to as (ϕ = 0°, θ = 0°, ψ = 0°), in three-dimensional space. The Euler's rotations are expressed by eqn (1) in the supplementary material, where R and R′ indicate the (0°, 0°, 0°) spatially-directed and the rotated atomic positions of the MA cation, respectively. Under rotation, the centre of the unit cell of MABiSeI was explicitly selected to be the origin of the body axes in order that the displacement of the rigid body (the MA cation) involves no translation of the body axes. The only change is thus in its orientation, and hence the corresponding internal displacements of the atoms in the MA cation are according to the rotation about the body axes. As systematically described in Fig. 1(b–e), the Euler angles are defined as operating anticlockwise starting from 0° to 345°. The flips are discretised into 24 turning steps with a 15° step size for each angle of rotation, so that our simulations, containing 243 = 13824 sets of orientational arrangements of the MA cation, completely cover all eight octants of the simulation cell. After applying the Euler's rotations to the MA cation, performing some post-processing of the resulting data is required in order to afford a new insight into the orientation-related energies of the organic MA cation.
Fig. 1 The cubic structure of CH3NH3BiSeI2 (MABiSeI) with labelled atoms (a); the definition of the Euler angles (b) for the MA cation where the N–C bond is directed to the N-axis. The first rotation is rotated anticlockwise through angle ϕ about the c-axis (c). The second rotation is anticlockwise via angle θ about the a′-axis or N-axis (d). Finally, the third rotation is rotated anticlockwise through angle ψ about the c′-axis (e). Note that all atoms of the inorganic BiSeI2 cage were kept fixed throughout the calculations, while the organic MA cation was the only thing to reorient according to the Euler's rotations. Nearly all figures are generated by VESTA.16 |
Fig. 2(a) displays an energy–population distribution representing all of the MA’s orientations for MABiSeI. All values of the total energy are normalised by subtracting the lowest E0 from each E: that is, E − E0 ≡ ΔE. As a result, the energy distribution is truncated at the minimum and maximum points of 0 and 17.9 meV per atom, respectively. The mean energy, accounting for about 9 meV per atom, can be interpreted as an average barrier height of all the MA cation’s orientation-dependent energies, depicted as the most populated array of the histograms. The relationship between the energy and each angle of rotation is included in the supplementary material (see Fig. S1, ESI†). Moreover, the energetics of the corrugated potential of the hybrid organic–inorganic system can effectively be portrayed as a four-dimensional energy landscape, as shown in Fig. 3(a), which is expressed explicitly as a function of three angles of rotation: that is, ΔE ≡ ΔE(ϕ, θ, ψ).9
Fig. 3 (a) Four-dimensional plot of E − E0 (meV) with respect to angles ϕ, θ, and ψ. (b) Three-dimensional and contour plots of E − E0 with ϕ = 45°. See the main text for a description. |
To preserve the orthogonality of the four-dimensional axes, a series of cross-sections visualising the three-dimensional energy landscapes are clearly delineated. The topographic features of the energetics accounting for the MA cation orientations are illustrated, as an example, by the ΔE(ϕ = 45°, θ, ψ) slice, shown in Fig. 3(b). The landscape, defining how the organic molecule jiggles within the inorganic framework, obviously comprises four repeating patterns of a single mountain surrounded by a couple of deep pits and a little cup on the left (see also the contour plot). Being amongst a large set of highest peaks with ΔE = 17.9 meV per atom, these four energy barriers—slightly smaller than those of FAPbI3 (with the highest peak of 24.7 meV per atom)9 and MAPbI3 (18.6 meV/MA-cation)33 —roughly imply that a thermal excitation energy of ∼208 K is required to flip the MA cation according to a given path in the configurational landscape, provided that ΔE ∼ kBT, whereas the pits indicate the energetically preferred orientations due to their lowest possible total energy. More importantly, further along the θ-axis from its origin in Fig. 3(a), on the left stands a couple of the highest mountains, consistent with the cross-section shown in Fig. S1(b) (ESI†). By the same token, similar characteristics can be seen along the ψ-axis (see also Fig. S1(c), ESI†). In accordance with these two 2D landscapes with a period of 180°, when the MA cation flips along the C–N shaft for its period, the environment remains unchanged. It is worth mentioning that the 3D landscapes are geometrically reducible so that the equivalence sets can be observed once only: namely, ΔE(ϕ, θ, ψ) = ΔE(ϕ, 360° − θ, ψ) in the θ-fixed scheme and ΔE(ϕ, θ, ψ) = ΔE(ϕ + 180°, θ, ψ) in the ϕ-fixed scheme.
However, if one considers the relationship between ΔE and ϕ, a supposedly Gaussian barrier with a period of 90° (see Fig. S2, ESI†) emerges, similar to previous works,9,34 with a highest barrier of 9.6 meV per atom, which is attributable to the fact that the dipole merely azimuthally turns away from I2 to I1, and vice versa. The (ϕ + n·90°, θ, 0°) configurations (with n = 1, 2, 3, and 4) blatantly resemble a set of preferred orientations of local minima (ΔE = 3–4 meV per atom) separated by arrays of saddle reefs, and the H atoms thereby prefer pointing towards the I atom. Also, the ψ-fixed schemes are reducible according to the relationship ΔE(ϕ, θ, ψ) = ΔE(ϕ, θ, ψ + 180°). That being said, the bivariate or pairwise correlations between each Euler angle and ΔE, expressed by the Pearson's correlation coefficient (ρ),35 are far from unity (ranging from −0.013 to 0.044), roughly suggesting no linear correlation. The remaining 3D landscapes are reported in Fig. S2–S12 (ESI†).
With the aim of capturing the complex trends and correlations of high-dimensional data within energy landscapes, the artificial neural network (ANN), being the current in vogue statistical tool based on deep learning, is designed using the Keras frontend on top of the Tensorflow machine learning library.38,39 The aim is then achieved by inputting, for example, the angles of rotations (ϕ, θ, and ψ) as input features/descriptors, and outputting ΔE by means of regression. Generally, feature augmentation is also crucial for reducing the probability of losing important information which might improve the predictions.40 Thus, pairwise bond lengths are included as descriptors in addition to the Euler angles. Fig. S14 (ESI†) presents a set of seven pairwise relationships expressed by parallel axes, intensively discussed by Wegman et al.41Fig. 4 illustrates pictorially the best tweaked ANN regressor architecture comprising an input layer, feeding three Euler angles together with C–Bi, C–Se, C–I1, C–I2, H1–Bi, H2–Bi, and H3–Bi bond-lengths, which is accompanied by five fully connected hidden layers with 500 neurons each, and an output layer which takes the output of the previous fully connected layer as an input and calculates the value of ΔE via a linear activation function. To train our model, 13824 samples in our dataset are randomly sorted, as represented in Fig. 2(b), where 80% are set as the training set (11059 samples) and 20% (2765 samples) as the test set. The root mean square error (RMSE) between the predicted and the DFT-calculated values is utilised as the cost function, which is minimised during training using the Adam stochastic optimiser.42 To improve the training behaviour, the dataset is normalised by subtracting the mean of each feature from each value and dividing by the feature range so that all values are within the range of 0 and 1. The training process is repeated 10 times so that the optimised values are in good agreement with a maximum 5% error.
As a result, Fig. 5(a) evidences the improvement in our ANN with an increase in the number of hidden layers. The RMSEs corresponding to both the training set (blue) and test set (red) taper off at 5 hidden layers, specifically when each layer consists of 500 neurons, with which the model shows no sign of overfitting (a modelling error that occurs when a relationship/function is too closely or exact a fit to a particular set of data), i.e., RMSE = 0.39 ± 0.03 meV per atom for the test set, while they gradually increase when the number of layers grows over 6 hidden layers and begin to overfit at 9 hidden layers onwards. Likewise, 500 neurons per layer for each of the five hidden layers are confirmed to have the relatively lowest error, as reported in Fig. 5(b). This confirms that the smallest error occurs at 500 neurons for each hidden layer. Fig. 5(c) reports the results obtained from our optimised ANN regressor with the obtained RMSEs of 0.24 meV per atom for the training set and 0.37 meV per atom for the test set. It is clear that our data-driven framework provides a reliable estimation of the DFT calculations using around 104 training data, together with ten properties of inorganic crystals, as the input by designing and systematically optimising a neural network regressor to output ΔE close to the DFT obtained values.
It is worth mentioning that our assumption, keeping the inorganic framework unchanged, is based on a simple model in which the other chemical and physical factors in this hybrid material are not taken into consideration, especially when designing the neural network. It, however, provides a good starting point for further study, where other factors such as the distortion of the inorganic cages, as well as the long-range molecular interaction between the MA cation and its counterparts embedded in the neighbouring unit cells, should be incorporated as inputs for the neural network. As such, this will require a supercell in which the MA cations are arranged differently according to the Euler angles applied.
Footnote |
† Electronic supplementary information (ESI) available. See DOI: 10.1039/d1ma00076d |
This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2021 |