High-throughput screening for solid-state Li-ion conductors combining machine learning and first-principles calculations

We present a high-throughput computational screening for fast lithium-ion conductors aimed at identifying candidate materials for application in all-solid-state electrolytes. Beginning with more than 30,000 experimentally reported Li-containing structures drawn from the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database, the Materials Platform for Data Science (Pauling file), and the Crystallography Open Database, we apply a series of automated structural and compositional filters to obtain 1500 unique crystal structures suitable for electronic-structure calculations which yields nearly 1,000 electronic insulators. We then estimate Li-ion diffusivities for these insulating candidates using molecular dynamics simulations at multiple temperatures. To make simulations computationally feasible at this scale while preserving near first-principles fidelity, we employ a foundational machine-learned interatomic potential which is carefully fine-tuned on relevant Li-chemistries. We discuss the details of the fine-tuning strategies and data-consistency considerations required to obtain a very accurate and robust model. From the MD results, we identify three particularly promising novel oxide candidates for room-temperature solid-state electrolytes, including LiSn2(AsO4)3, LiIn(IO3)4, and LiB6S4(Cl3O4)2, which all exhibit ionic conductivity greater than 1 mS/cm at room temperature with diffusion barrier between 0.20 and 0.25 eV. We provide the full screening protocol as well as a prioritised list of materials for experimental follow-up, demonstrating the value of provenance-aware, ML-driven simulations in accelerating solid-state electrolyte discovery.