Graeme Ackland's PhD opportunities

Each year I offer to supervise PhD projects in Computer Simulation from my very wide range of interests. Look through my publications list to see what type of projects I'm interested in.

Funding is available through EPSRC for sufficiently good UK students (normally a first class physics degree or a particular aptitude for computer simulation). Grants are available for UK students, by applying to physics , and non-EU students through SUPA . Mention my name and area in your application if you want ot work with me!

Current opportunities within the areas of Nuclear Fusion Reactor Materials , Complex Systems and Quantum Mechanical calculations at high pressure at CSEC

The networking/complexity area is very open at the moment, we're looking at feedback systems which show stability, these include the published ecological stuff on daisyworld and generalised Lotka-Volterra, as well as the things listed on the NANIA site, and some ongoing work on evolutionary genetics etc.

The molecular dynamics is much more well focussed on the specific problem of making simple models for interatomic force in metals (iron with impurities) and using these for simulation of what happens when a high energy neutron (14MeV in the case of fusion) collides with a reactor wall. Basically, lots of defects are formed, then recombine, and the unknown issue is how the amount of damage scales with the energy of the neutron (unsurprisingly, there's no experimental facility to test this, although the IFMIF project may provide such a thing). Thus projections for fusion reactor lifetimes are based on extrapolation from much lower energy radiation. Quantum Mechanics simulations are based on the CASTEP and VASP codes, and try to understand the weird behaviour of simple materials under pressure: why silicon has 12 different crystal structures or why barium changes from a close packed crystal structure, to one with infinitely many atoms, and back again under pressure. And there are over 100 other elements to choose from!