Understanding quantum materials: a computational and theoretical journey

Abstract: Due to spatial confinement, low-dimensional materials have attracted significant attention as emerging quantum materials. Thanks to spectacular progress in the development of atomically precise bottom-up synthesis methods, accurate knowledge of atomic content and configurations is now readily available, making it possible to create a strong link between theoretically predicted properties and their experimental observation. Several characterization techniques have been employed to improve the understanding of these materials, to establish their crystal structure, purity, and internal configurations but their interpretation can be tedious without modeling and simulation.

Biography: Vincent Meunier is a Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics at The Pennsylvania State University where he holds the P.B. Breneman Chair. He has been the Head of the Department since July 2022, after 7 years in a similar role at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Meunier earned his Ph.D. from the University of Namur in Belgium in 1999 and was a senior research and development staff member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory until 2010 when he joined Rensselaer as an Associate Professor with tenure. He has published more than 300 papers in peer-reviewed journal, his h-index is 78, and he is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), the Institute of Physics (IoP), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Meunier leads the Innovative Computational Material Physics (ICMP) group at Penn State where his research uses theory and computation to examine the atomic-level details of materials. He is the founding and current Editor-in-Chief of the journal Carbon Trends since 2020.