First-principles prediction of electronic transport in fabricated semiconductor heterostructures via physics-aware machine learning

Abstract

First-principles techniques for electronic transport property prediction have seen rapid progress in recent years. However, it remains a challenge to predict properties of heterostructures incorporating fabrication-dependent variability. Machine-learning (ML) approaches are increasingly being used to accelerate design and discovery of new materials with targeted properties, and extend the applicability of first-principles techniques to larger systems. However, few studies exploited ML techniques to characterize relationships between local atomic structures and global electronic transport coefficients. In this work, we propose an electronic-transport-informatics (ETI) framework that trains on ab initio models of small systems and predicts thermopower of fabricated silicon/germanium heterostructures, matching measured data. We demonstrate application of ML approaches to extract important physics that determines electronic transport in semiconductor heterostructures, and bridge the gap between ab initio accessible models and fabricated systems. We anticipate that ETI framework would have broad applicability to diverse materials classes.