Bond, orbital and spin order in d4/d6/d7 perovskite oxides: successes and limitations of foundation interatomic potentials

Foundation machine-learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) are rapidly replacing density-functional theory (DFT) for modeling structure and nuclear dynamics, making their fidelity in strongly correlated systems an urgent question.

We test three foundation potentials on the low-temperature order of three correlated, isostructural ABO3 perovskite oxides: LaMnO3 (d4), LaCoO3 (d6), and NdNiO3 (d7).

We run molecular dynamics for 1 ns on 80- and 160-atom supercells from 50 to 300 K with no system-specific training.

These oxides expose three distinct classes of low-temperature order that define a hierarchy of difficulty for the potentials.

The scalar class, represented by NdNiO3, has a simple geometric fingerprint and is captured.

The vector class, represented by LaMnO3, requires identifying which Cartesian axis carries the long bond at each site, and is captured in magnitude but not in symmetry.

The on-site class, represented by the low-spin to high-spin crossover in LaCoO3, is a purely local multiplet population shift with no spatial order parameter and remains inaccessible to present-day MLIPs.