Enabling materials informatics for 29Si solid-state NMR of crystalline materials

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a powerful tool for obtaining precise information about the local bonding of materials, but difficult to interpret without a well-vetted dataset of reference spectra. The ability to predict NMR parameters and connect them to three-dimensional local environments is critical for understanding more complex, long-range interactions. New computational methods have revealed structural information available from 29Si solid-state NMR by generating computed reference spectra for solids. Such predictions are useful for the identification of new silicon-containing compounds, and serve as a starting point for determination of the local environments present in amorphous structures. In this study, we have used 42 silicon sites as a benchmarking set to compare experimentally reported 29Si solid-state NMR spectra with those computed by CASTEP-NMR and Vienna Ab Initio Simulation Program (VASP). Data-driven approaches enable us to identify the source of discrepancies across a range of experimental and computational results. The information from NMR (in the form of an NMR tensor) has been validated, and in some cases corrected, in an effort to catalog these for the local spectroscopy database infrastructure (LSDI), where over 10,000 29Si NMR tensors for crystalline materials have been computed. Knowledge of specific tensor values can serve as the basis for executing NMR experiments with precision, optimizing conditions to capture the elements accurately. The ability to predict and compare experimental observables from a wide range of structures can aid researchers in their chemical assignments and structure determination, since the computed values enables the extension beyond tables of typical chemical shift (or shielding) ranges.