3 ms·

Eh? This isn't my experience of condensed matter DFT at all. It's a pretty hot area in the UK/Europe at least, and there are lots of postdocs being advertised,

by tfgg 11y ago

Eh? This isn't my experience of condensed matter DFT at all. It's a pretty hot area in the UK/Europe at least, and there are lots of postdocs being advertised, as well as a reasonable number of new faculty being hired in the area. Maybe if you're just hitting 'go' on someone else's code, sure, but developing high throughput analysis or higher levels of theory... I mean, until recently, the head of the Cambridge CMP theory group was a DFT guy.

selimthegrim 11y ago
UK and Europe are different. Italy has very active electronic structure groups and UK has people like the group at Cambridge and Rex Godby or Matthias Scheffler at FHI. The funding structure here in the US simply does not reward higher levels of theory, and high throughput analysis is being driven here in the US by Scheffler's acolytes (and Gerbrand Ceder, etc). No less than Peter Littlewood told people here at a DFT conference a few years back bitching about funding "Go to chemistry and materials science departments instead, they will love you"
- tfgg 11y ago
  I agree with your analysis, I did notice that not many groups in the US were doing what looked like interesting new methods/theory, more 'cashing in' on existing code in a fairly short term way. There are people like Louie and Vanderbilt, though. I did my DFT methods PhD in a materials department group, full of Italian/German/English physicists, anyway :)
  - selimthegrim 11y ago
    Vanderbilt and Louie are the real deal, but what they do is much closer to hard CMT. They have students who are real superstars. As an aside, Vanderbilt was at the same conference. He told me how the same trend chasing and flight to chemistry and materials science departments had taken place among DFT people with high-Tc in the eighties that was taking place with topological materials now, and that this was a symptom of "(long-time sociological) problems I can't fix"

by tfgg 11y ago

selimthegrim 11y ago

UK and Europe are different. Italy has very active electronic structure groups and UK has people like the group at Cambridge and Rex Godby or Matthias Scheffler at FHI. The funding structure here in the US simply does not reward higher levels of theory, and high throughput analysis is being driven here in the US by Scheffler's acolytes (and Gerbrand Ceder, etc). No less than Peter Littlewood told people here at a DFT conference a few years back bitching about funding "Go to chemistry and materials science departments instead, they will love you"

tfgg 11y ago
I agree with your analysis, I did notice that not many groups in the US were doing what looked like interesting new methods/theory, more 'cashing in' on existing code in a fairly short term way. There are people like Louie and Vanderbilt, though. I did my DFT methods PhD in a materials department group, full of Italian/German/English physicists, anyway :)
- selimthegrim 11y ago
  Vanderbilt and Louie are the real deal, but what they do is much closer to hard CMT. They have students who are real superstars. As an aside, Vanderbilt was at the same conference. He told me how the same trend chasing and flight to chemistry and materials science departments had taken place among DFT people with high-Tc in the eighties that was taking place with topological materials now, and that this was a symptom of "(long-time sociological) problems I can't fix"