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In the pursuit of advancing solar energy technologies, this study presents 20 direct and quasi-direct band gap silicon crystalline semiconductors that satisfy the Shockley-Queisser limit, a benchmark for solar cell efficiency. Employing two evolutionary algorithm-based searches, we optimize structures and calculate fitness function using the DFTB method and Gaussian approximation potential. Following the preselection of structures based on energy considerations, we further optimize them using PBEsol DFT. Subsequently, we screen the structures based on their band gap, employing a DFTB method tailored for band gap calculation of silicon crystals. To ensure accurate band gap determination, we employ HSE and GW methods. To validate the structural stability, we employ phonon analysis via linear regression algorithm applied to PBEsol DFT data. Significantly, the structures unveiled in this study are of great importance due to their proven stability from both mechanical and dynamic perspectives. Furthermore, the ductility and low density of certain structures enhance their potential application. We examine the optical properties by studying the imaginary part of the dielectric function by solving the Bethe-Salpeter Equation on top of GW approximation. By calculating the SLME, we achieve an efficiency of 32.7% for Si$_{22}$ at a thickness of 500 nm. Moreover, the study harnesses various machine learning algorithms to develop a predictive model for the band gap energy of these silicon structures. Input data for machine learning models are derived from structural MBTR and SOAP descriptors, as well as DFT outputs. Notably, the results reveal that features extracted from DFT outperform the MBTR and SOAP descriptors., Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, 5 tables

Compositional disorder is common in crystal compounds. In these compounds, some atoms are randomly distributed at some crystallographic sites. For such compounds, randomness forms many non-identical independent structures. Thus, calculating the energy of all structures using ordinary quantum ab initio methods can be significantly time-consuming. Machine learning can be a reliable alternative to ab initio methods. We calculate the energy of these compounds with an accuracy close to that of density functional theory calculations in a considerably shorter time using machine learning. In this study, we use kernel ridge regression and neural network to predict energy. In the KRR, we employ sine matrix, Ewald sum matrix, SOAP, ACSF, and MBTR. To implement the neural network, we use two important classes of application of the neural network in material science, including high-dimensional neural network and convolutional neural network based on crystal graph representation. We show that kernel ridge regression using MBTR and neural network using ACSF can provide better accuracy than other methods., Comment: 15pages,3figures,1table