RESEARCH

The work of TYC groups encompasses the whole range of materials that are important to society, including those created by science and technology, and those occurring in the natural world and in living organisms.

The search box below lets you scan quickly the full range of TYC research and find who is working on topics that interest you.

See also Science Highlights and Simulations

The breadth of TYC interests can be illustrated by some randomly chosen examples:

- photovoltaic materials for harvesting solar energy

- nuclear fuel and containment materials that are resistent to radiation damage

- materials for fuel cells with improved performance

- alloys for jet turbines having lower weight and higher operating temperature

- dielectric and semiconductor materials for devices with sub-micron dimensions

- more efficient and selective catalysts, including framework materials

- properties of materials under extreme conditions of interest to planetary scientists and the defence industry

- the growth of ice in the upper atmosphere

- ion transport across cell membranes

As this list shows, contemporary challenges that are important to TYC include materials for energy, for the environment, and for health. Many of these challenges involve processes at surfaces and interfaces.

Adventurous work on real-world problems demands innovations in basic science and in techniques, and an important strength of TYC is that innovation and applications are closely linked. The techniques we use span all the length scales. At the atomic scale, they include the many varieties of density functional theory, as well as quantum chemistry and quantum Monte Carlo, plus tight-binding theory and empirical potentials, with kinetic Monte Carlo used to extend the time-scales. Coarse-graining techniques, as well as methods such as dislocation dynamics and phase-field theory are used to reach the micro- and meso-scales, while finite-element and other methods are used at the engineering scales.

The search facility on the Research homepage lets you explore the full range of techniques that we work with.