Periodic table | EPFL Graph Search

The periodic table, also known as the periodic table of the elements, arranges the chemical elements into rows ("periods") and columns ("groups"). It is an organizing icon of chemistry and is widely used in physics and other sciences. It is a depiction of the periodic law, which says that when the elements are arranged in order of their atomic numbers an approximate recurrence of their properties is evident. The table is divided into four roughly rectangular areas called blocks. Elements in the same group tend to show similar chemical characteristics. Vertical, horizontal and diagonal trends characterize the periodic table. Metallic character increases going down a group and decreases from left to right across a period. Nonmetallic character increases going from the bottom left of the periodic table to the top right. The first periodic table to become generally accepted was that of the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869; he formulated the periodic law as a dependence of chem

Tensor-Based Numerical Method For Stochastic Homogenization

This paper addresses the complexity reduction of stochastic homogenization of a class of random materials for a stationary diffusion equation. A cost-efficient approximation of the correctors is obtained using a method designed to exploit quasi-periodicity. Accuracy and cost reduction are investigated for local perturbations or small transformations of periodic materials as well as for materials with no periodicity but a mesoscopic structure, for which the limitations of the method are shown. Finally, for materials outside the scope of this method, we propose to use the approximation of homogenized quantities as control variates for variance reduction of a more accurate and costly Monte Carlo estimator (using a multifidelity Monte Carlo method). The resulting cost reduction is illustrated in a numerical experiment and compared with a control variate method from weakly stochastic homogenization. The limits of this variance reduction technique are tested on materials without periodicity or mesoscopic structure.

SIAM PUBLICATIONS2022

Resolution-robust Large Mask In painting with Fourier Convolutions

Anastasia Remizova

Modern image inpainting systems, despite the significant progress, often struggle with large missing areas, complex geometric structures, and high-resolution images. We find that one of the main reasons for that is the lack of an effective receptive field in both the inpainting network and the loss function. To alleviate this issue, we propose a new method called large mask inpainting (LaMa). LaMa is based on i) a new inpainting network architecture that uses fast Fourier convolutions (FFCs), which have the imagewide receptive field; ii) a high receptive field perceptual loss; iii) large training masks, which unlocks the potential of the first two components. Our inpainting network improves the state-of-the-art across a range of datasets and achieves excellent performance even in challenging scenarios, e.g. completion of periodic structures. Our model generalizes surprisingly well to resolutions that are higher than those seen at train time, and achieves this at lower parameter&time costs than the competitive baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/saic-mdal/lama.

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2022

Spectral properties of extended systems from Koopmans-compliant functionals

Riccardo De Gennaro

Electronic-structure simulations have been impacting the study of materials properties thanks to the simplicity of density-functional theory, a method that gives access to the ground state of the system. Although very important, ground-state properties represent just part of the information, and often technological applications rely more on excited-state properties. In the context of density-functional theory, the latter are difficult to extract and one usually has to resort to more sophisticated approaches. In the last years, Koopmans spectral functionals have emerged as an effective method which combines the feasibility of density-functional theory with the accuracy of more complex methods, such as many-body perturbation theory. While retaining its simplicity, Koopmans functionals extend the domain of density-functional theory providing direct access to charged excitations, and ultimately to the photoemission spectra of materials. This approach has been extensively employed in finite systems, displaying an accuracy which is comparable to that of state-of-the-art many-body perturbation theory methods. In extended systems, calculations were bound to the supercell (Gamma-only) method, preventing the access to the full band structure of the system. In this work we overcome this limitation, proving that a band structure description of the energy spectrum is possible, and providing a scheme to carry out calculations in crystalline materials. The first result of this work consists in proving the compliance of Koopmans functionals with the translation symmetry of the system. The validity of Bloch's theorem, thus the possibility of describing the spectrum via a band structure picture, depends on this condition. Because of the orbital-density-dependent nature of the functional, the invariance of the total energy with respect to unitary transformations of the one-electron orbitals is broken. The energy is then minimized by a particular set of orbitals, called ``variational'', which are strongly localized in space. In extended periodic systems, the localized, thus non-periodic, character of the variational orbitals is inherited by the effective orbital-density-dependent Hamiltonians, which apparently break the translation symmetry of the system. Here we show that, by requiring the variational orbitals to be Wannier functions, the translation symmetry is preserved and Bloch's theorem holds. In the second part, we devise a scheme to unfold the band structure from supercell (Gamma-only) calculations, and reconstruct the k-dependence of the quasiparticle energies. This method is then used to compute the band structures of a set of benchmark semiconductors and insulators. Finally, we describe a novel formulation of Koopmans functionals for extended periodic systems, which exploits from the beginning the translation properties of Wannier functions to realize a primitive cell-based implementation of Koopmans functionals. Results obtained from this second approach are also discussed. In the last part, we present the preliminary study of impurity states arising in crystalline materials in the presence of point defects.

EPFL2022

Spectral properties of extended systems from Koopmans-compliant functionals

Riccardo De Gennaro

EPFL2022