My first conference of the year, and the last while at NREL, will be the APS March Meeting in Pittsburgh. The APS is perfect for those with short attention spans, a parade of ten minute talks, splattered over an immense number of parallel sessions. Fortunately, my talk is 8 am on the first morning, so I can relax for the rest of the conference. I have begun filtering through the sessions, building my ‘personal schedule’. Rest assured if you didn’t get sick enough of graphene last year, there are a dozen more sessions to wade through in 2009.
A few sessions stand out so far:
1. Predictive Materials Design for Alternative Energy. Five invited presentations centered around the use of hydrogen for renewable energy, from a modeller’s perspective.
2. Semiconductors: Atomic Structure and Lattices. A nice mix of talks in this session, but I am quite biased since I appear on two abstracts (phase changes in Ge2Sb2Te5 and the ordering properties of quaternary chalcogenides).
3. Focus Session: Dilute Magnetic Oxide Semiconductors. Sessions on DMS are always worth attending, if only for the high probability for some good fights. The last fall MRS was no exception: talk A observes ferromagnetism in a given system, talk B fails to, talk C predicts ferromagnetism should exist at room temperature, talk D predicts paramagnetism. In this context, the opening abstract correctly describes the present situation as ‘anarchy’. The current theoretical hot topic, in particular for d0 ferromagnetism (magnetism with no magnetic dopant present, a close relative of alchemy) is defect localization. This is of course something chemists have been well aware of for a long time (e.g. see the abundance of literature on CeO2, TiO2, even Li-doped MgO). No doubt physicists will preach this as a revelation to all that will listen.
4. Computational Study of Semiconductor Band Structures. Many aspects of semiconductor theory I’ve been acquiring over the last two years are covered here: band offsets, deformation potentials, alloy theory.
5. Frontiers in Electronic Structure Theory. A session I’m obliged to go to. This year does look quite interesting. Many years ago I was at a workshop for the code CRYSTAL where they promised periodic MP2 very shortly, which is only materializing now in CRYSCOR. Here, Kresse et al. appear to have caught up fast. Maybe this will get released in VASP 6, circa 2020.