Developing a complete AI-accelerated workflow for superconductor discovery
The quest to identify new superconducting materials with enhanced properties is hindered by the prohibitive cost of computing electron-phonon spectral functions, severely limiting the materials space that can be explored. Here, we introduce a Bootstrapped Ensemble of Equivariant Graph Neural Networks (BEE-NET), a machine-learning model trained to predict the Eliashberg spectral function and superconducting critical temperature with a mean-absolute-error of 0.87 K relative to DFT-based Allen-Dynes calculations. Intriguingly, BEE-NET achieves a true-negative-rate of 99.4%, enabling highly efficient screening for the rare property of superconductivity. Integrated into a multi-stage, AI-accelerated discovery pipeline that incorporates elemental-substitution strategies and machine-learned interatomic potentials, our workflow reduced over 1.3 million candidate structures to 741 dynamically and thermodynamically stable compounds with DFT-confirmed Tc > 5 K. We report the successful synthesis and experimental confirmation of superconductivity in two of these previously unreported compounds. This study establishes a data-driven framework that integrates machine learning, quantum calculations, and experiments to systematically accelerate superconductor discovery.
Authors
- P. J. Hirschfeld (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0375-7386)
- J. J. Hamlin (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8685-153X)
- Z. Li
- Richard G. Hennig (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4933-7686)
- G. R. Stewart (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7251-1684)
- Benjamin Geisler (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0864-2908)
- Ajinkya C. Hire (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3147-2521)
- Jason Gibson (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7974-5264)
- Philip M. Dee (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4249-9036)
- Jung Soo Kim (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3901-6785)
- Pawan Prakash
Institutions
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory (US)
- University of Florida (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- npj Computational Materials
- Published
- 2026-01-27
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41524-026-01964-8
- Primary Topic
- Machine Learning in Materials Science
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00