Stable and metastable rare-earth-free permanent magnets from a database of predicted crystal structures

Abstract

With the recent developments in crystal structure prediction, databases of new (not previously synthesized) materials are being created. One of these databases contains more than a million entries with the distance to the Convex Hull predicted by crystal-graph attention networks. Hence, stable and metastable materials can be extracted and then investigated for any desired properties. A high-throughput and data-mining approach we previously developed to search for rare-earth-free permanent magnets was applied to these compounds. As a result, four promising candidates for novel rare-earth-free permanent magnets were discovered with high magnetization, high uniaxial magnetocrystalline anisotropy, and high Curie temperature - Ta3ZnFe8, AlFe2, Co3Ni2, and Fe3Ge. The materials were investigated in more detail and all were verified to be dynamically stable.