
Designing New Materials with Quantum Mechanics Dr Phil Hasnip, School of Physics, Engineering and Technology
Event details
School of Physics, Engineering and Technology Winter Webinar Series
From designing new pharmaceuticals to save lives to ways to recover waste heat as electricity, understanding and improving materials is crucial. Many of the key properties of materials are due to the behaviour of 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 a Lecturer and Research Software Engineer in the School of Physics, Engineering & Technology at the University of York. He grew up in the 1980s, where he learned physics at school and computer programming on his 8-bit Sinclair ZX Spectrum. He now combines both interests as a lead developer of the CASTEP software (www.castep.org), which uses quantum mechanics to model and predict new materials and chemicals.