Our research focuses on the development and application of materials theory to accelerate the understanding, discovery, and design of novel functional materials.
We develop first-principles electronic structure methods and atomistic simulation methods to enable theoretical predictions and fundamental understandings of electrical, thermal, magnetic, and optical properties.
We are looking for higly motivated PhD, master's, and undergraduate students interested in theory, simulation, and method development.
Students with a background in physics, chemistry, materials science, or computer science are encouraged to contact Prof. Xiaofeng Qian at feng@tamu.edu.
04/16/2025: Congratulations to Kenna Ashen on receiving the 2025 MSEN Excellence in Outreach Award for her dedicated efforts in inspiring younger generations, mentoring undergraduate students, and serving the materials science community.
03/12/2025: Our collaborative work with Shuiwang Ji, Xiaoning Qian, and Raymudo Arroyave's groups on HIENet - a Hybrid Equivariant-Invariant Materials Foundation Model - is now shared on arXiv:
Preprint: Keqiang Yan, Montgomery Bohde, Andrii Kryvenko, Ziyu Xiang, Kaiji Zhao, Siya Zhu, Saagar Kolachina, Doğuhan Sarıtürk, Jianwen Xie, Raymundo Arroyave, Xiaoning Qian, Xiaofeng Qian, and Shuiwang Ji. A Materials Foundation Model via Hybrid Invariant-Equivariant Architectures. arXiv Preprint:2503.05771 (2025).
Code: https://github.com/divelab/AIRS/tree/main/OpenMat/HIENet
11/22/2024: Our collaborative work with Daniel Rhodes group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on the anisotropic superconductivity in bilayer Td-MoTe2 is published on Physical Review Letters:
Zizhong Li, Apoorv Jindal, Alex Strasser, Yangchen He, Wenkai Zheng, David Graf, Takashi Taniguchi, Kenji Watanabe, Luis Balicas, Cory R. Dean, Xiaofeng Qian, Abhay N. Pasupathy, and Daniel A. Rhodes. Twofold Anisotropic Superconductivity in Bilayer Td-MoTe2. Physical Review Letters 133, 216002 (2024). arXiv preprint, arXiv:2409.09308.
10/1/2024: We are very excited share a collaborative work with Shuiwang Ji and Xiaoning Qian groups on LLM-based crystal generation which is accepted by Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS):
Paper: Keqiang Yan, Xiner Li, Hongyi Ling, Kenna Ashen, Carl Edwards, Raymundo Arroyave, Marinka Zitnik, Heng Ji, Xiaofeng Qian, Xiaoning Qian, and Shuiwang Ji. Invariant Tokenization of Crystalline Materials for Language Model Enabled Generation. The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) (2024).
Code: https://github.com/divelab/AIRS/tree/main/OpenMat/Mat2Seq
8/15/2024: Welcome two new PhD students, Saagar Kolachina and Chengdong Wang, to join our group in Fall 2024!
5/1/2024: We are very delighted to share another collaborative work with Shuiwang Ji and Xiaoning Qian groups on the prediction of general O(3) equivariant tensorial properties of arbitrary order which is accepted by Conference on Machine Learning (ICML):
Paper: Keqiang Yan, Alexandra Saxton, Xiaoning Qian, and Shuiwang Ji. A Space Group Symmetry Informed Network for O(3) Equivariant Crystal Tensor Prediction. The Forty-first International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) (2024).
Code: https://github.com/divelab/AIRS/tree/main/OpenMat/GMTNet
3/19/2024: Congratulations to Alex Strasser for being selected to participate in the 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings (Physics) in Germany this summer.
2/9/2024: We are very excited to share a recent collaborative work with Prof. Qiong Ma's group at Boston College, and the experimental findings verified our previous theoretical prediction of quantum spin Hall topological insulators in the family of van der Waals layered 1T'-MM'Te4
Dual quantum spin Hall insulator by density-tuned correlations in TaIrTe4. Nature 628, 515–521 (2024).
Van der Waals Stacking-Induced Topological Phase Transition in Layered Ternary Transition Metal Chalcogenides. Nano Letters 17, 467–475 (2017).
We are very grateful for the support from funding agencies and research collaborators.