Generating candidates in global optimization algorithms using complementary energy landscapes

Global optimization of atomistic structure rely on the generation of new candidate structures in order to drive the exploration of the potential energy surface (PES) in search for the global minimum energy (GM) structure. In this work, we discuss a type of structure generation, which locally optimizes structures in complementary energy (CE) landscapes. These landscapes are formulated temporarily during the searches as machine learned potentials (MLPs) using local atomistic environments sampled from collected data. The CE landscapes are deliberately incomplete MLPs that rather than mimicking every aspect of the true PES are sought to become much smoother, having only few local minima. This means that local optimization in the CE landscapes may facilitate identification of new funnels in the true PES. We discuss how to construct the CE landscapes and we test their influence on global optimization of a reduced rutile SnO2(110)-(4x1) surface, and an olivine (Mg2SiO4)4 cluster for which we report a new global minimum energy structure.