A transferable artificial neural network model for atomic forces in nanoparticles

Abstract

We have designed a new method to fit the energy and atomic forces using a single artificial neural network (SANN) for any number of chemical species present in a molecular system. The traditional approach for fitting the potential energy surface for a multicomponent system using artificial neural network (ANN) is to consider n number of networks for n number of chemical species in the system. This shoots the computational cost and makes it difficult to apply to a system containing more number of species. We present a new strategy of using a SANN to compute energy and forces of a chemical system. Since atomic forces are significant for geometry optimizations and molecular dynamics simulations for any chemical system, their accurate prediction is of utmost importance. So, to predict the atomic forces, we have modified the traditional way of fitting forces from underlying energy expression. We have applied our strategy to study geometry optimizations and dynamics in gold-silver nanoalloys and thiol protected gold nanoclusters. Also, force fitting has made it possible to train smaller sized systems and extrapolate the parameters to make accurate predictions for larger systems. This proposed strategy has definitely made the mapping and fitting of atomic forces easier and can be applied to a wide variety of molecular systems. © 2018 Author(s).