Finding Global Minimum in the Potential Energy Landscape

The next talk as part of George Mason Observatory’s ‘Evenings Under the Stars’ series (where you’ll also get to look at awesome galaxies, stars, planets and more through our 0.8 meter telescope!) will be ‘The most important problem you’ve never heard of – Finding Global Minimum in the Potential Energy Landscape ‘ by Adam Cadien. As always the event is free and everyone is invited!

Some details about the event: Monday 21 October 2012: 1st talk at 730 PM, same talk at 815 PM, observing starts at 8PM until 10PM. Directions to GMU and Research Hall here: http://eagle.gmu.edu/map/fairfax.php Zoom in to find Research Hall next to engineering building and York River Rd. Keep an eye on twitter for updates – if weather is poor the event may be postponed a week – updates will be available here – Observatory Twitter

About the talk:

Being able to accurately determine the arrangement of atoms in materials is the best way to gain a better of understanding of how that material works and how to make it better. This knowledge is remarkably valuable and has applications in many areas of science and technology today. However, full atomic structure information is still hard to come by in many situations.

Adam will discuss the basics of modern experimental and computational methods for finding atomic structure.

About the Speaker:

Adam Cadien is a Graduate student at GMU concentrating in Computational Materials Science. Adam has had experience in a range of topics in physics and technology, but believes that Materials Science is the most exciting thing you can learn about today. He will be talking about atomic structure prediction and its applications.