Jun 21 2017
The supercomputer ranking published on 19 June 2017, places Switzerland’s 19.6 petaflop Piz Daint supercomputer third in the world after Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe 2, two Chinese supercomputers. Piz Daint’s recent upgrades allowed it to climb five positions up the ranking. With a performance of 93 petaflops, China’s TaihuLight is by far the most powerful number-cruncher …
Apr 14 2017
During my days in Ithaca (Cornell University), I had the great opportunity to show part of my research work. I decided to present the research I had just finished at that time about the possibility to induce a metallic state in ice under pressure and upon doping; thinking that I could attract more attention and …
Mar 14 2017
While basis set convergence sounds straightforward (though time-consuming) it is hard to rule out that underlying assumptions in the design of the basis set influences the results. However, converged basis set DFT results are needed to separate basis set errors from errors due to the functional. Multiwavelets, a systematic and adaptive multiresolution numerical solution of the …
Oct 20 2016
We have recently investigated the possibility of achieve high-temperature superconductivity in hydrides under pressure by inducing metallization of otherwise insulating phases through doping, a path previously used to render standard semiconductors superconducting at ambient pressure. Following this idea, we study HO, which is one of the most abundant and well-studied substances in the universe! We …
Sep 19 2016
Probably one of the most excited week of my life. For many reasons and in many contexts that week in Lindau was simply: magical. After the semester ends, and with new projects in hands, with two nice papers ready to submit, summer that knocks the door, and personally ready to turn on the page. All …
Jun 07 2016
In past May (2016) I attended the first edition of the International Workshop in “Superhydrides Towards Room Temperature Superconductivity: Hydrides and More” . This was a very important meeting because it gathers the world-wide experts (experimentalists and theoreticians) in this matter. The urgent of the meeting was motivated by the 200 K superconductivity discovered only …
Apr 03 2016
An international collaboration with colleagues from over 30 universities and institutes to investigated to what extent quantum simulations of material properties agree when they are performed by different researchers and with different software. Thanks to an online collaboration, they successfully demonstrated that the most recent generations of codes agree well, in contrast to earlier generations. …
Jan 28 2016
A neural net system built by Google has beaten the European champion in the Chinese game of Go, winning five out of five games and crossing a new threshold for machine intelligence. In a recent paper published in Nature, DeepMind researchers revealed how the system was constructed and how it was able to succeed where …
Jan 09 2016
Recently scientist from the Edinburgh’s Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions have come close to creating a long-sought new state for hydrogen. The group used a set-up called a diamond anvil cell to compress its sample of molecular hydrogen. This apparatus is essentially two gems that have been placed in opposition to each other. Their …
Dec 07 2015
Following the recent discovery of very high temperature conventional superconductivity in sulfur hydride (critical temperature Tc of 203 K). Experimentalist have shown results on the covalent hydride phosphine (PH3) which also exhibits a high Tc > 100 K at pressure P > 200 GPa. However, neither the exact composition nor the crystal structure of the …
Aug 27 2015
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz observed that hydrogen sulfide becomes superconductive at minus 70 degree Celsius —when the substance is placed under a pressure of 1.5 million bar. This corresponds to half of the pressure of the earth’s core. With their high pressure experiments …
Mar 27 2015
Our work has just been published in Physical Review B ! In this theoretical work, we studied in detail the electron-phonon superconductivity of honeycomb MX layered structures where X is one element of group IV (C, Si, or Ge) and M is an alkali or an alkaline-earth metal. Among the studied compositions we predict a …
Ishiwata-sensei's team eager of condensed matter physics and pizza! During my visit to the University of Osaka.
This year promises much more exciting news. I was kindly invited by one of the leaders -worldwide- in the field of superconducting hydrides. His team have measured the highest superconducting transition at 250 K! (the machine in the picture)
