Crystal net catalog of model flat band materials
Abstract
Flat band systems are currently under intense investigation in quantum materials, optical lattices, and metamaterials. These efforts are motivated by potential realization of strongly correlated phenomena enabled by frustration-induced flat band dispersions; identification of candidate platforms plays an important role in these efforts. Here, we develop a high-throughput materials search for bulk crystalline flat bands by automated construction of uniform-hopping near-neighbor tight-binding models. We show that this approach captures many of the essential features relevant to identifying flat band lattice motifs in candidate materials in a computationally inexpensive manner, and is of use to identify systems for further detailed investigation as well as theoretical and metamaterials studies of model systems. We apply this algorithm to 139,367 materials in the Materials Project database and identify 63,076 materials that host at least one flat band elemental sublattice. We further categorize these candidate systems into at least 31,635 unique flat band crystal nets and identify candidates of interest from both lattice and band structure perspectives. This work expands the number of known flat band lattices that exist in physically realizable crystal structures and classifies the majority of these systems by the underlying lattice, providing additional insights for familiar (e.g., kagome, pyrochlore, Lieb, and dice) as well as previously unknown motifs.
Copyright and License
© The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Acknowledgement
We thank J. Cano, B.-J. Yang, T. Suzuki, G. Tritsaris, D. Tabor, and A. Aspuru-Guzik for useful discussions. This research is funded in part by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation EPiQS Initiative, through Grant GBMF9070 to J.G.C. (computation), NSF grant DMR-2104964 (statistical analysis), and AFOSR grant FA9550-22-1-0432 (crystallographic analysis). H.N. and L.Y. acknowledge support by the STC Center for Integrated Quantum Materials, NSF grant number DMR-1231319. This work was performed in part at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-1607611.
Contributions
P.M.N. wrote the code with input from J.P.W. and S.F., P.M.N., J.P.W., and S.F. interpreted the search results with input from L.Y. H.N., J.P.W., and L.Y. performed preliminary geometry-based searches. J.G.C. supervised the project. All authors analyzed the results and contributed to writing the manuscript.
Data Availability
The search results and curated list are available as a supplementary data sheet. See Supplementary Note 3 for more information.
Code Availability
Code used to generate tight-binding models and identify/classify flat bands is available at https://github.com/pmneves7/Crystal-Net-Flat-Bands/tree/main.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no competing interests.
Files
Additional details
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- GBMF9070
- National Science Foundation
- DMR-2104964
- United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- FA9550-22-1-0432
- National Science Foundation
- DMR-1231319
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-1607611
- Caltech groups
- Institute for Quantum Information and Matter