Stephen Elliott Sabbatical Vist

Computational design of thermally-functional materialsSabbatical visit host Professor Jeffrey Neaton, Molecular Foundry and Kavli ENSI

Stephen Elliott spent the month of May 2018 at Berkeley during his sabbatical year as part of the Winton-Kavli, Cambridge-Berkeley exchange scheme.  His host for the visit was Professor Jeff Neaton, Director of the Molecular Foundry at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).  

One of the aims of the visit was to learn more about the work being carried out at Berkeley and LBNL on materials for thermoelectricity generation, the latter being allied to the Winton's mission for sustainability. Another area of interest was work in the Physics Department, in the group of Professor Frances Hellman, on the preparation of amorphous silicon (a-Si) films having extremely low values of mechanical loss. This work is directly relevant to some of Stephen’s very recent computer-simulation work [1], in which he has used a recently-developed linear-scaling (O(N)) interatomic potential for Si, derived using a machine-learning approach, to generate models of a-Si with unprecedently high degrees of structural order, and hence correspondingly low values of mechanical loss. It is hoped that a collaborative effort can be initiated between the two groups to make a-Si in glassy form, directly from the liquid, which should have the highest degree of structural order, and thus the lowest value of mechanical loss, for this material.

[1] J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 9, 2879-2885 (2018)