Add

PhD - Queen Mary University - Physics

Project title:
Molecular dynamics simulations of radiation damage in fusion reactors

Project description:
It is increasingly realized that energy is becoming a crucial and precious resource in modern society. Fusion has enormous potential, safety and environmental advantages, and hence could make a large difference to energy supplies. Operation of fusion reactors presents a set of technological and scientific challenges. Chief of these is understanding and predicting the performance of the reactor material subject to radiation damage by 14 MeV neutrons produced in the fusion reaction. The neutrons of this energy can not be produced in the laboratory, and their effect can not be studied experimentally. On the other hand, recent advances in computer simulation techniques have opened the way to model the radiation damage of high energy using massive parallel molecular dynamics (MD) simulations (see Figure 1 below). This sets the motivation for this PhD project and its main aims: (a) use MD simulations to model the process of ballistic displacements of very high energy in a typical reactor material (metal); (b) document and visualize radiation-induced structural changes at the atomistic level; (c) discuss physical mechanisms of what impact these changes will have on the performance of fusion reactors.

The project will use our recently developed MD code which is nearly perfectly scalable on parallel supercomputers and is currently capable of simulating systems of up to 1 billion atoms. The UK Supercomputing Facility (HECToR) will be used for these simulations.

This PhD studentship is fully funded. The tentative start is in Autumn 2010. A minimum of BSc (2:1) in Physics or related subjects is required for this post. Good knowledge of programming (e.g. Fortran) is an advantage.

Informal enquiries are to be sent to K. Trachenko (email k.trachenko@qmul.ac.uk).