Tom Swinburne wins the Materials Design Advanced Graduate Research Prize 2013

The Materials Design Advanced Graduate Research Prize for 2013 has been awarded to Tom Swinburne

His project is supervised by Prof Adrian Sutton from the Department of Physics, and Dr Steven Fitzgerald and Prof Sergei Dudarev, from the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy. Reacting to news of the award, Tom said that he was "very pleased given the quality of the competition!".

Over the last nine months Tom has made outstanding progress including the publication of his first paper in Physical Review B[1]. Tom's impressive and innovative development of a dynamical coarse-grained representation of a dislocation enables kinks to be simulated at experimental stress levels -- typically a million times smaller than are accessible to molecular dynamics (MD). Significantly, Tom's work contradicts earlier theoretical analyses but agrees with previous MD simulations. "We have established an approach to model small crystal defect systems, reproducing what is seen in atomistic simulation at a fraction of the computational cost", said Tom and, looking to the future, "the challenge now is to tackle much larger and topologically challenging scenarios in micro-structure evolution, to be in closer comparison with experiment."

[1] Theory and simulation of the diffusion of kinks on dislocations in bcc metals. Swinburne, T. D.; SL Dudarev, SP Fitzgerald, MR Gilbert & AP Sutton, Physical Review B 87, 064108 (2013)