events

Materials Simulations in Earth and Planetary Sciences Seminar Series

on September 11, 2022

This virtual seminar series consists of talks on current applications of Materials Simulations to Earth and Planetary Sciences. It meets on select Mondays at 3:00 PM ET.

Host: Renata Wentzcovitch, APAM and DEES, Columbia Engineering

Click to see the introduction. This area of research has expanded dramatically in recent years and has become an integral part of this research field. It is not an overstatement that the future of planetary sciences depends heavily on the ability to simulate processes taking place on planetary interiors, e.g., the unveiling of the internal structure of super-Earths. This seminar series aims to present state-of-the-art activities in this area not just by computational scientists but also by experimental scientists willing to motivate computational research in their respective areas of interest.
The attendance and speakers will be beyond Columbia University’s borders, and researchers from prominent centers will be invited to participate and/or give invited talks. Computational studies of planetary materials have focused to a great extent on very high pressures since this is the most challenging condition for experiments. We hope to bring to the forefront and motivate more research on lower pressures, e.g., < 10 GPa. This is a very challenging pressure range for materials simulations for multiple reasons, e.g., the approximations used in simulations are less accurate at low pressures, and the abundance of complex experimental information at these pressures forces simulations to deal with controversial data.