30-Apr-2026
Welcome to the second KIM Quarterly Update for 2026! We hope you are having a pleasant and productive year. Here are the exciting developments that have occurred in OpenKIM in the past three months.
Announcements
- A new polynomial machine learning potential (PolyMLP) model driver is now available in OpenKIM (DOI: 10.25950/948ad72c), accompanied by 837 parametrizations for 167 material systems, developed by Dr. Atsuto Seko (Kyoto University). See the announcement here.
- The OpenKIM collection of Verification Checks continues to expand, further ensuring that OpenKIM models are correctly implemented. Two new Verification Checks have been released to test KIM Portable Models. See the announcement here.
- The KIM API has been updated to 2.4.2 with bug fixes, improved debug logging, and retries for failed downloads. See the announcement here.
- An information-matching approach to optimal experimental design and active learning, a collaborative paper between the OpenKIM team and several other organizations has been published in Applied Physics Letters. See the announcement here.
- Two new commentaries, Path sampling for rare events boosted by machine learning by Porhouy Minh and Sapna Sarupria, and Event-Chain Monte Carlo: The global-balance breakthrough by E.A.J.F. (Frank) Peters, have been published in KIM REVIEW, our journal containing commentaries and discussion on seminal papers in molecular simulation. Several new commentaries are coming soon. Please visit kimreview.org to see the these upcoming articles and subscribe to KIM REVIEW updates. As always, we are seeking nominations of papers for future review.
- The Software and Projects Using KIM page has been updated with new projects and a list of review and research papers to better reflect the profound impact OpenKIM has had on the computational materials science community. Contact us with additional projects and papers to add.
- Raw MongoDB queries are the most flexible way to query OpenKIM content, and at this time are the only way to query material properties computed for over 32,000 crystals under the Crystal Genome (XtalG) framework. To help users navigate Mongo queries, we have added a guide .
Ongoing Developments
- Additional Crystal Genome (XtalG) Test Drivers are in active development, including phonons and finite temperature properties such as Gibbs free energy, heat capacity, and anisotropic thermal expansion coefficients.
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