Structure Prediction of Organic/Inorganic Interfaces with Genarris

Organic/inorganic interfaces perform critical functions in organic electronic devices, and their structure can affect device performance. In addition, interactions with the substrate can promote the growth of otherwise metastable thin-film structures by epitaxial templating. Predicting the structure of organic/inorganic interfaces by computer simulations can aid in the design of interfaces with desirable properties. We present Genarris Interfaces, a structure generator for organic/inorganic interfaces. Genarris Interfaces uses epitaxy matrices to impose commensurism with the substrate. Film structures are generated in all layer groups that are compatible with the substrate symmetry and the requested number of molecules per unit cell. Clustering and down-selection are performed to reduce the number of structures while maintaining the diversity of packing motifs. Finally, relaxation and stability ranking are performed using dispersion-inclusive density functional theory (DFT). We demonstrate the application of Genarris for the interfaces of PTCDA on Ag(111), TCNE on Au(111), and naphthalene on Cu(111). In all cases, we find generated structures that resemble experimental scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) images. The electronic structure agrees well with spectroscopy experiments, where available. We envision Genarris Interfaces being used to predict the structure of organic/inorganic interfaces, to generate initial populations for other structure prediction algorithms, and to generate data sets for training machine learning models.