Application of Machine Learning tools to recognition of molecular patterns in STM images

The ability to utilize individual molecules and molecular assemblies as data storage elements has motivated scientist for years, concurrent with the continuous effort to shrink a size of data storage devices in microelectronics industry. One of the critical issues in this effort lies in being able to identify individual molecular assembly units (patterns), on a large scale in an automated fashion of complete information extraction. Here we present a novel method of applying machine learning techniques for extraction of positional and rotational information from scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) images of $\pi $-bowl sumanene molecules on gold. We use Markov Random Field (MRF) model to decode the polar rotational states for each molecule in a large scale STM image of molecular film. We further develop an algorithm that uses a convolutional Neural Network combined with MRF and input from density functional theory to classify molecules into different azimuthal rotational classes. Our results demonstrate that a molecular film is partitioned into distinctive azimuthal rotational domains consisting typically of 20-30 molecules. In each domain, the ``bowl-down'' molecules are generally surrounded by six nearest neighbor molecules in ``bowl-up'' configuration, and the resultant overall structure form a periodic lattice of rotational and polar states within each domain.