Computational Lab for Innovative Materials

We are exploring physical and chemical phenomena occurring at heterogeneous interface as well as pure system. To understand structure-property relationship based on atomistic modeling, the first-principle approach is powerful. We are applying and developing the state-of-the-art theoretical tools towards realistic modeling and better understanding. If you are interested in our lab, please contact me (gslee@unist.ac.kr). 

Understanding electron transport in bulk materials and across their interface is very important to industrial applications such as energy conversion and electronic devices. Also  quantum mechanical effect in condensed system results in noble phenomena such as superconductivity, magnetism and topological states, which can be utilized towards new kinds of devices . In contrast to classical mechanics, probabilistic description by quantum mechanics becomes important to describe behavior of electrons at submicron length scale. Phenomena occurring in the microscopic world are hardly predicted by our intuition. Thus the role of quantum many body simulations is as important as experiments to understand physical/chemical properties and further to get new insight. 

Our main research interest is to predict various properties of materials by using the state-of-the-art simulation tools and to develop advanced software tools for overcoming limitations of existing codes.  One can design a new hetero-material towards next-generation electronic applications by examining its structural stability and electronic/magnetic structures.  The most powerful tool has been based on the density functional theory method, which is highly transferable over different systems with the good trade-off between accuracy and computational effort. In spite of its success, it has a limited application with poor reliability for such systems with significant electron correlation, non-adiabatic effects, and is hardly applicable to open or non-equilibrium system. Thus it is necessary to develop a new computational tool for reliable and realistic prediction.