Publication date: 15th December 2025
The rapid advancement in emerging optoelectronic technologies demands highly efficient, affordable, and ecofriendly materials. In this context, ternary chalcogenides, especially ternary selenides, show early promise as a material class due to their stability and remarkable electronic, optical, and transport properties. Herein, we integrate first-principles-based high-throughput computations with machine learning (ML) techniques to predict the thermodynamic stability and optoelectronic properties of 920 valency-satisfied selenide compounds. Through investigating polymorphism, our study reveals the edge-sharing orthorhombic Pnma phase (NH4CdCl3-type) as the most stable structure for most ternary selenides. High-fidelity supervised ML models are trained and tested to accelerate stability and band gap predictions. These data-driven models pin down the most influential features that dominantly control key material characteristics. The multistep high-throughput computations identify the ternary selenides with optimal direct band gaps, light carrier masses, and strong optical absorption edges. The extensive materials screening considering phase stability, toxicity, and defect tolerance, finally identifies the seven most suitable candidates for photovoltaic applications. Two of these final compounds, SrZrSe3 and SrHfSe3, have already been synthesized in a single-phase form, with the latter showing an optically suitable band gap, aligning well with our findings. The non-adiabatic molecular dynamics reveal sufficiently long photoexcited charge carrier lifetimes (on the order of nanoseconds) in some of these selected selenide materials, indicating their exciting characteristics. Overall, our study suggests a robust in silico framework that can be extended to screen large datasets of various material classes for identifying promising photoactive candidates.[1]
D. G. acknowledges the IIT Delhi SEED Grant (PLN12/04MS), the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Department of Science and Technology (DST), India, for the Start-up Research Grant SRG/2022/00l234, CSIR-Human Resource Development Group (HRDG) for ExtraMural Research-II Grant 01/3136/23/EMR-II and the IIT Delhi HPC facility for computational resources. The research presented in this article was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) under project number 20190656PRD4 and 20240590ECR. This work was performed in part at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnology (CINT) at LANL, a U.S. DOE and Office of Basic Energy Sciences user facility. This research used resources provided by the LANL Institutional Computing Program. LANL is operated by Triad National Security, LLC, for the National Nuclear Security Administration of U.S. Department of Energy (Contract No. 89233218CNA000001).
