AdsorbML: A Leap in Efficiency for Adsorption Energy Calculations using Generalizable Machine Learning Potentials

Computational catalysis is playing an increasingly significant role in the design of catalysts across a wide range of applications. A common task for many computational methods is the need to accurately compute the minimum binding energy — the adsorption energy — for an adsorbate and a catalyst surface of interest. Traditionally, the identification of low energy adsorbate-surface configurations relies on heuristic methods and researcher intuition. As the desire to perform high-throughput screening increases, it becomes challenging to use heuristics and intuition alone. In this paper, we demonstrate machine learning potentials can be leveraged to more accurately and efficiently identify low energy adsorbate-surface configurations. Our DFT verified algorithm provides a spectrum of performance trade-offs, with one balanced option finding the lowest energy configuration, within a 0.1 eV threshold, 86.33% of the time, while achieving a 1331x speedup in computation. To standardize benchmarking, we introduce the Open Catalyst Dense dataset containing nearly 1,000 diverse surfaces and 85,658 unique configurations.