Designing new materials with quantum mechanics Dr Phil Hasnip, Department of Physics
Event details
Physics Winter Webinar series
From designing new pharmaceuticals to save lives, to ways to recover waste heat as electricity that could help with climate change, understanding and improving materials is crucial. Many of the key properties of materials are dominated by their electrons, which are quantum particles. Quantum mechanics gives us very accurate predictions, but solving the equations directly needs huge amounts of computing power; we would exhaust the whole of the world’s data storage by the time we got to seven electrons - that’s just one atom of nitrogen! So how can we possibly model a real material with quantum mechanics? Join Dr Phil Hasnip as he explains how a clever theorem and sophisticated software can solve this issue and allow us to not only predict material properties, but even design brand-new materials with properties we’ve never seen before.
About the speaker
Dr Phil Hasnip is an EPSRC Research Software Engineering Fellow based in the Department of Physics at the University of York, and a lead developer of the CASTEP software (www.castep.org), which uses quantum mechanics to model materials and chemicals. He has over 20 years' experience developing research software and using it for novel scientific investigations, with a particular interest in making scientific software user-friendly, scalable, efficient and reliable.