The use of machine learning interatomic potentials for the verification of experimental molecular crystal structures.

A correctly solved crystal structure should agree with the experimental data, and its geometry should correspond to a local minimum on the potential energy surface (PES). The idea of verifying crystal structure solutions by comparing them with their geometry-optimized versions was introduced 15 years ago. Recent developments in machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have made it possible to replace computationally expensive density functional theory (DFT) calculations with AI/neural-network-based alternatives. MLIPs can reach DFT-comparable precision with a substantial gain in speed. We selected one promising MLIP, Universal Models for Atoms, trained on the Open Molecular Crystals 2025 dataset, and processed a prefiltered subset of 216 919 structures from the Cambridge Structural Database. Due to the limitations of the MLIP available when this study commenced, ionic compounds, salts and metal-containing structures were excluded. The current methodology cannot process disordered structures, and available computational resources limit the maximum unit-cell volume that can be treated to 4000 Å