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Educational visit to Les Houches, May 2015
Report by Glenn Jones. Powered by FuseNet

I have recently returned from a two week visit to the beautiful part of the Alps where the École de Physique des Houches is located. The purpose of the visit was to attend a course on multiscale modelling techniques for materials science. I was the only student there whose work is directly related to fusion and this was very useful as I was completely surrounded by people who exclusively work on modelling, rather than being surrounded by mostly experimentalists at my home in the Department of Materials in Oxford.

The focus of the lessons at the school was on bridging the gaps between different types of models used to simulate material properties, something I am aiming to do in my fusion related work. Specifically I am trying to create a model that can access time scales associated with diffusion (seconds) whilst still keeping some discrete level of detail in the model, in order to investigate the effects of radiation damage on tungsten divertor components. Current purely atomistic models only have the timescale range of micro to milliseconds depending on how many atoms you want to model.

The school was split into 5 courses each with 6 hours of teaching and an additional 3-4 hours of practical, hands on keyboard exercises. Giulia Galli from the University of Chicago did her lectures on expanding the scale of electronic structure calculations, which delved right in quantum mechanical considerations of electrons and density functional theory (DFT) as this approach is very accurate in explaining how atoms and molecules interact.

Peter Gumbsch of the Fraunhofer Institut and KIT’s lectures were titled: Introduction to multiscale modelling of materials and covered a lot of the basics as well as plasticity and discrete dislocation dynamics (DDD). Then it was on to bridging length scales, from atomistic to continuum by William Curtin of EPFL which had lots of fascinating information on concurrent coupling between different models of different scales, how to seamlessly join them together with accurate and physically correct boundary conditions.

Kurt Kremer from the MPI for polymer research in Mainz taught multiscale modelling techniques for soft materials such as polymers and bio-molecules and finally, the fifth course was on time-scale bridging in materials models by Normand Mousseau of the Université de Montréal which I found extremely informative for my current work.

It was such a pleasure to be taught by some really knowledgeable people who work in my very specific field and I now know so much more about how to address the problems I am likely to come across as I progress through the next 3 years of my PhD. That coupled with the friends I made from all over world leave me in excellent stead to channel this new knowledge into high impact research for the fusion community. I am very grateful to FuseNet for providing me with the funding that made this trip possible.