TCM's Permanent Staff

Prof. Mike Payne, FRS, is currently Head of TCM, and has worked on first principles total energy calculations since 1985 and is the author of the first principles total energy pseudopotential code CASTEP. He was awarded the 1996 Maxwell Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics and gave the 1998 Mott Lecture. He is responsible for many of the technical developments that have led to the widespread adoption of the total energy pseudopotential technique and has pioneered the application of this technique to a wide range of scientific problems from physics, chemistry, materials science, earth sciences and, most recently, biology.

Mike Payne

Prof. Emilio Artacho's research area is in computer simulation of complex solids and liquids, using first-principles molecular dynamics based on density functional theory and on linear-scaling DFT. Three main lines of research are being pursued at the moment: Oxide heterostructures including multiferroics, liquid water and water/solid interfaces (wet systems), and non-adiabatic processes related to radiation damage of materials.

Emilio Artacho

Dr Claudio Castelnovo's interests are in the area of emergent and out of equilibrium phenomena in strongly correlated many body systems. Current research topics include the effects of hard constraints in classical and quantum systems; freezing and glassiness; frustrated magnetism; topological order, quantum information and quantum computing. In 2012 he was the co-recipient of the 2012 EPS CMD Europhysics Prize for the prediction and experimental observation of magnetic monopoles in spin ice. He was also awarded the IUPAP C10 Young Scientist Prize 2013.

Claudio Castelnovo

Prof. Nigel Cooper's research concerns the properties of many-particle quantum systems in which strong correlations are important. His work spans both the traditional solid state setting of semiconductor materials and the field of ultra-cold atomic gases. His work on rapidly rotating atomic gases identified a novel regime in which the groundstates are unusual phases of matter, the excitations of which are expected to obey ``non-abelian'' exchange statistics. In 2007 he was awarded the Maxwell Medal by the Institute of Physics.

Nigel Cooper

Prof. Volker Heine, FRS, has been retired since 1997, having previously been Head of the TCM group. His research interests have been the electronic structure of solids including surfaces, the origin of incommensurate structures, and the application of physics and computer simulation to the study of minerals. He is now active in promoting collaboration across Europe on electronic structure, particularly raising grants.

Volker Heine

Prof. Brian Josephson, FRS, has been a member of the group since the 1960's. While he was a graduate student he predicted the so-called Josephson effects, for which he was awarded the physics Nobel prize in 1973. His current interests include the organisation of brain function, and relationships between mind and physical reality.

Brian Josephson

Prof. David Khmelnitskii is a Senior Research Fellow of Trinity College and a member of the TCM group since January 1991. Before that, starting from 1968, he conducted research in the broad field of condensed matter theory in the Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics, Moscow. His accomplishments are associated with the renormalization-group theory of critical phenomena, effects of disorder on phase transitions, the Quantum Hall Effect and coherent phenomena in disordered conductors, including weak localisation, anomalous magnetoresistance and mesoscopic fluctuations. In 1993 he was awarded the Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize.

David Khmelnitskii

Dr Austen Lamacraft works at the interface of condensed matter and atomic physics, with a particular interest in quantum magnetism, low dimensional systems, and nonequilibrium phenomena. As befits an interdisciplinary field, he uses a range of theoretical techniques including effective field theories, novel Monte Carlo methods, classical field simulations, and classical and quantum integrable models.

Austen Lamacraft

Prof. Richard Needs has been researching the electronic properties of materials since 1983. He has worked on a wide range of complex systems such as surfaces, interfaces, defects, and clusters, mainly studying structural properties, including phase transitions and excitation energies. He has used a variety of computational techniques, including density functional theory methods, many-body perturbation theory and quantum Monte Carlo methods. In recent years he has been developing continuum fermion quantum Monte Carlo methods and applying them to problems in condensed matter. He and his group have developed the "CASINO" quantum Monte Carlo code which is now used in a number of groups around the world.

Richard Needs

Prof. Ben Simons has a track record of research in the field of mesoscopic physics and biological physics. His interests focus on the interplay of interaction and quantum interference effects in both semi-conducting and superconducting media. Lately his research activities have targetted the impact of disorder on quantum phase transitions in magnetic metals and superconductors and, separately, on studies of the optical properties of highly excited semiconductors, as well as studies of stem and progenitor cell fate in normal tissues and cancers. In 2000 he was awarded the Maxwell Medal by the Institute of Physics, and in 2011 he was appointed to the Herchel Smith Chair in the Physics of Medicine.

Ben Simons

Prof. Mark Warner, FRS, is one of the founders of the field of liquid crystal elastomers, which has yielded many exotic phenomena that are now confirmed experimentally. A flavour of some of these is given below as background to the proposed projects. For this he received a Maxwell Medal and Prize and a von Humboldt Research Prize. In 2003 Prof. Warner was awarded the Agilent Technology Prize by the European Physical Society.

Mark Warner