I moved to Imperial College London in June 2007. You should automatically be forwarded to my new web page in 5 seconds, if not then click here.

Picture of Peter Haynes

Peter Haynes

Theory of Condensed Matter,
Cavendish Laboratory,
University of Cambridge,
Madingley Road,
Cambridge CB3 0HE

Research Interests

The accurate modelling of atomistic processes requires the solution of the equations of quantum mechanics. However, for systems of many interacting particles, these equations are far too difficult to solve, even using the most powerful supercomputers. The approach of density-functional theory (DFT) allows the properties of the ground-state of a system to be calculated within a set of well-controlled approximations. It is therefore possible to perform quantum-mechanical computer simulations from first principles or ab initio i.e. making no a priori assumptions about the behaviour of the system being studied. Traditional DFT calculations require a computational effort which scales asymptotically as the cube of the system-size, as a result of the description of the system in terms of a set of extended wave functions. Reformulating DFT in terms of the single-particle density-matrix in principle allows calculations to be performed with a computational effort which scales only linearly with system-size. I am currently working on the implementation of such a method. For more information, see my Ph.D. thesis.

A workshop on Local orbitals and linear-scaling ab initio calculations was held in September 2001.

For more information about electronic structure, see the ElectronicStructure.org website.

[ Publications | Talks ]

[ Links | Photo Album | CV | Web Search ]

Valid HTML 4.01! Last modified: Tue Oct 29 14:46:30 2002 -->

Peter Haynes