Informatics-Driven Design of Superhard B-C-O Compounds

Materials containing B, C, and O, due to the advantages of forming strong covalent bonds, may lead to materials that are superhard, i.e., those with a Vicker's hardness larger than 40 GPa. However, the exploration of this vast chemical, compositional, and configurational space is nontrivial. Here, we leverage a combination of machine learning (ML) and first-principles calculations to enable and accelerate such a targeted search. The ML models first screen for potentially superhard B-C-O compositions from a large hypothetical B-C-O candidate space. Atomic-level structure search using density functional theory (DFT) within those identified compositions, followed by further detailed analyses, unravels on four potentially superhard B-C-O phases exhibiting thermodynamic, mechanical, and dynamic stability.