High-throughput Screening of Plastic Deformable Inorganic Semiconductors

Inorganic semiconductors play an important role in fields such as information, sensor, and energy. But most bulk inorganic semiconductors are intrinsically brittle. With the development of smart electronic components like flexible electronic devices, it is urgent to explore plastically deformable inorganic semiconductors. For high-throughput screening of possible candidate materials, a reliable, universal, and convenient factor is needed. In this paper, a simple plastic deformability factor consisting of only elastic constants was proposed, which were examined by the experimentally verified plastic inorganic semiconductors Ag2S and InSe. Through data mining, 612 types of bulk layered materials were selected from more than 40,000 three-dimensional materials, two of which (PbI2 and CuInP2S6) were further experimentally verified, showing the reliability of this factor. This simple factor could be used to rapidly predict the plastic deformability of layered materials and large-scale screening of candidate inorganic materials for next-generation deformable and flexible electronic devices.