Dr. Jonas Wiebke (Postdoctoral Fellow)

Centre for Theoretical Chemistry and Physics Bldg.44, NZ Institute for Advanced Study Massey University (Albany Campus) Private Bag 102904 North Shore MSC, Auckland New Zealand Phone +64 9 414 0800 ext. 9657 Fax +64 9 443 9779 Email: j.wiebke@massey.ac.nz

Research interests

Main proposed research goals are accurate ab initio simulations of high pressure fcc-hcp transitions and melting of Ne, Ar, Kr, and Xe crystals. Long-term goals include simulations of high pressure melting of simple van der Waals-bounded molecular crystals as nitrogen and, possibly, methane. First steps include fitting of effective three-body interaction functional forms to potential energy landscapes from state-of-the-art ab initio electronic structure calculations. Introductory studies of rare-gas virial expansions, high pressure equations of state of crystals, and cluster melting, will benchmark the accuracy of our simulation techniques and provide significant contributions to the field on their own.