ProfessorPeter Harrowell

Project Opportunities

Title: Computational study of the structure and dynamics of supercooled liquids

Summary of opportunity:

Amorphous or glassy solids represent one of the last great challenges for materials science, chemical physics and condensed matter physics. These important materials present us with a range of fundamental puzzles: How do we account for materials properties in the absence of well defined crystal structures? Are there defects in glasses that govern the slow relaxation of these materials? What stabilizes these non-equilibrium solids against crystallization? What microscopic quantities determine the glass transition temperature at which the liquid state is recovered on heating? The goal of this  project is to develop and apply novel simulation methods to provide explicit answers to these questions.

Opportunity synopsis:

The heart of this project is to develop simulation methods that allow each of the questions indicated above to be articulated explicitly in the form of an algorithm to be applied to the statistics of particle positions, momenta and interparticle forces. The tools are molecular dynamics simulations and statistical physics. The projects will include developing useful measures of amorphous structure and the establishing the relationship between structure and dynamics.