The Ab initio Nanoscience Group for Simulation and
Theoretical Research on Materials is located within
the Chemistry Department at the University of
California Davis and headed by Prof. Giulia Galli. We develop
and use quantum mechanical simulation tools to understand and
predict the properties and behavior of materials (solids,
liquids and nanostructures) at the microscopic scale.
We are part of the CCI Solar - Powering the Planet center: a NSF Center for Chemical Innovation led by Harry Gary at Caltech. [project website]
Our SciDAC project [ project website]. "Institute for Quantum Simulations of Materials and Nanostructure (Q-SIMAN)" enters its fourth year in Fall 2010. Our collaborators are Profs. Zhaojun Bai, Francois Gygi and Warren Pickett at UCD, Wei Cai at Stanford University, David Ceperley at UIUC, Nicola Marzari at MIT, Nicola Spaldin at UCSB and J-L. Fattebert, Eric Schweglerat LLNL. [more info][in UCD news]
In June 2010, three UCD co-PIs of the Q-SIMAN institute (Profs. Galli, Gygi and Pickett), in collaboration with the Institute for ultra-scale visualization, led by Prof. Kwan-Liu Ma, have been awarded a computational partnership, Scidac-e grant to collaborate with six of the EFRC centers: Center for Gas Separations Relevant to Clean Energy Technologies, led by Prof. B. Smit at UCB; Center for Energy Frontier Research in Extreme Environments (Efree), led by Dr. H-K Mao at the Carnegie Institution in Washington; The Center for Advanced Solar Photophysics, led by Dr. V.Klimov at LANL; Center for Emergent Superconductivity, led by Prof. J.C. S. Davis at Cornell; Center for Molecularly Assembled Material Architectures for Solar Energy Production, Storage, and Carbon Capture, led by Prof. V.Ozolins at UCLA; Solid State Solar Thermal Energy Conversion Center, led by Prof. Gang Chen at MIT.
In Fall 2010, we start a new NSF/Solar project on " Multiple Exciton Generation in All-inorganic Nanostructured Solar Cells " in collaboration with Profs. Z. Bai, Warren Pickett, Susan Kauzlarich, Delmar Larsen, Paul Debashis at UCD and Prof. S. Carter at UCSC.
In Fall 2010, we start a new Computational Materials Science Network funded by DOE on "Structure and dynamics of water and aqueous solutions in materials science", in collaboration with Prof. Roberto Car (Princeton University) and Prof. John Rehr (Washington University).