Neogi Group: CU Aerospace Nanoscale Transport Modelling (CUANTAM) Laboratory
We, the computational materials physicists at the CUANTAM lab, design and discover new materials to realize future technologies. Additionally, we discover novel pathways to transport energy and information in nanoscale materials that will optimize existing technologies. The top figure shows some example target aerospace and other technology applications that we explore here. We use several analytical and numerical modeling techniques to investigate how the structure of the materials relate to corresponding properties. The understanding of the structure-property relationship enables us to design new materials. We search for materials with optimal thermal or electronic properties for target applications. One example problem we investigate: what atomic arrangement in materials make them robust to sustain high temperature environments. The numerical techniques we employ range from first-principles electronic property modeling, atomistic molecular dynamics to finite element analysis. Our research spans four different fields:
(1) Artificial Intelligence for Materials Discovery: refers to the application of data-driven approaches for rapid design and discovery of novel materials and structures for target applications. We generate materials property data using physics principles and computational modeling. The use of various machine learning models such as neural network, random forests, convolutional neural network allow us to discover new materials with optimal properties.
Projects: Materials Design for Hypersonics; Modeling Real Materials; Beyond Moore's Law: Unconventional Computing Materials.
(2) Designing Materials for Harsh Environments: Operational conditions such as high temperature, oxidation or radiation, strongly affect the properties of materials and make their performance unpredictable. We model the change of materials behavior when they are exposed to such environmental conditions. The modeling provides deep insight how we can design materials that can sustain the aerospace environments. Projects: Materials Design for Hypersonics; Radiation Hard Microelectronics.
(3) Thermal Management: Ultra-high-frequency lattice vibrations are the heat energy carriers that determine the thermal environment in materials. We develop strategies to control, manipulate and guide the lattice vibrations in materials, known as phonons. Phonons are fundamental particles that carry heat, similar to photons, the carrier of electromagnetic energy. Efficient thermal management will improve thermal protections systems, and is key to realize faster, more reliable and energy efficient devices. Projects: Materials Physics for Thermoelectric Technologies; Next-Generation Electronic Chip Design.
(4) Manipulating Interaction Between Energy/Information Carriers: Recent research uncovered fundamentally new quantum sensing, memory and computing paradigm by manipulating interaction between information carriers such as polarizations of a photon or spin states of an atom or an electron. We investigate strategies to control and manipulate these interactions to discover new solid-state memory and computing technologies. Project: Solid-State Quantum Memory Applications.
