CoarsenConf: Equivariant Coarsening with Aggregated Attention for Molecular Conformer Generation.

Molecular conformer generation (MCG) is an important task in cheminformatics and drug discovery. The ability to efficiently generate low-energy 3D structures can avoid expensive quantum mechanical simulations, leading to accelerated virtual screenings and enhanced structural exploration. Several generative models have been developed for MCG, but many struggle to consistently produce high-quality conformers for meaningful downstream applications.

Investigating the behavior of diffusion models for accelerating electronic structure calculations.

We present an investigation of diffusion models for molecular generation, with the aim of better understanding how their predictions compare to the results of physics-based calculations. The investigation into these models is driven by their potential to significantly accelerate electronic structure calculations using machine learning, without requiring expensive first-principles datasets for training interatomic potentials. We find that the inference process of a popular diffusion model for molecular generation is divided into an exploration phase, where the model chooses the atomic species, and a relaxation phase, where it adjusts the atomic coordinates to find a low-energy geometry.

An Ecosystem for Digital Reticular Chemistry.

The vastness of the materials design space makes it impractical to explore using traditional brute-force methods, particularly in reticular chemistry. However, machine learning has shown promise in expediting and guiding materials design. Despite numerous successful applications of machine learning to reticular materials, progress in the field has stagnated, possibly because digital chemistry is more an art than a science and its limited accessibility to inexperienced researchers.

Spectrum of Exfoliable 1D van der Waals Molecular Wires and Their Electronic Properties.

Two-dimensional (2D) materials derived from van der Waals (vdW)-bonded layered crystals have been the subject of considerable research focus, but their one-dimensional (1D) analogues have received less attention. These bulk crystals consist of covalently bonded multiatom atomic chains with weak van der Waals bonds between adjacent chains. Using density-functional-theory-based methods, we find the binding energies of several 1D families of materials to be within typical exfoliation ranges possible for 2D materials.