NEWS
SUCCESSFUL BSc THESIS DEFENSE
27 February 2024
Amy Oppong has successfully defended her BSc thesis on the effects of tensile and compressive stress in complex oxide materials. Amy joined the group in November 2023 as the final part of her BSc programme at UvA/VU, and has spent 10 weeks investigating how we can use stress and strain to alter ionic conductivity in complex oxides. We wish Amy all the best in her future endeavors!
AMOLF SUSTAINABLE ENERGY MATERIALS COLLOQUIUM
20 November 2023
Emilia Olsson gave an invited talk entitled Computational Materials Design – Using atomic scale modelling to develop and optimise materials for next-generation energy technologies at the AMOLF Colloquium for Sustainable Energy Materials.
MATSUS FALL 2024
20th October 2023
Emilia Olsson was an invited speaker at the 2023 Materials for Sustainable Development Conference (MATSUS) Fall that took place in Torremolinos, Spain, 16-20 October. Contributing to the symposium Emerging Battery Technologies, Emilia presented the group's work on disordered carbon materials for Li, Na and K-ion battery technologies in her talk entitled Computational Materials Design - Probing Carbon Motifs for Next-generation Batteries.
OPEN PhD POSITION
17 October 2023
We have an opening for a highly motivated PhD student in the Materials Theory and Modelling group at ARCNL. If you are interested in pursuing a PhD in computational materials physics and chemistry to design next-generation coating materials with a direct application focus - apply through our institutional website.
IUPAC|Chains 2023
22 August 2023
Emilia Olsson gave an invited talk on materials design of perovskite oxides at IUPAC|Chains 2023 in the Hague.
VAN MARUM COLLOQUIUM
3 May 2023
Emilia Olsson gave a van Marum Colloquium at the University of Leiden on the topic of Understanding Surfaces and Interfaces from the Atomic Scale – Applications to Batteries and Semiconductors.
POSTER PRESENTATIONS AT
NWO PHYSICS
6 April 2023
NWO Physics is the largest physics conference in the Netherlands and was organised 3-5 April. Barsha Bhattacharjee and Johanna Nemec both presented posters of their PhD work in the Materials Physics session on the 4th April. Barsha presented a poster on tuning of mechanical properties of transition metal nitrides, and Johanna on the exploration of different atomic-scale modelling methods on silica structures.
NWO PHYSICS
6 April 2023
We organised a focus session on Computational Materials Design at NWO Physics 2023 in Veldhoven. Computational materials design is a vital tool in materials physics research and is of ever growing importance. Combining state of the art computational materials modeling and characterization, with experimental testing and validation allows for new materials to be designed for specific applications. Directly probing and predicting the correlation between the atomic scale structure and a material’s properties gives us powerful tools with which to design next generation technologies, advancing our society. Computational materials design is typically an interplay between, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, and materials science where the understanding of the underlying physical processes are becoming increasingly important to accurately predict and understand material properties and behavior. In this focus session, we brought together the Dutch computational materials modelling community focusing on density functional theory (DFT), molecular dynamics (MD), and multiscale modelling with talks on Taming the defects in halide perovskites: insights from multiscale simulations by Shuxia Tao from TU/e, In silico defect engineering to facilitate the design of functional materials by Jonathon Cottom from Leiden University, Modelling of Complex Energy Materials with Machine Learning by Nong Artrith from Utrecht University, and Multiscale materials design and modelling for electrochemical energy devices by Qiong Cai from the University of Surrey.
TWO BOOK CHAPTERS PUBLISHED
23 January 2023
We have contributed chapters to two books on sodium-ion batteries. The first book chapter details recent Computational Studies on Na-Ion Electrode Materials in Sodium‐Ion Batteries: Materials, Characterization, and Technology, and the second focuses on Atomistic Modeling and Analysis of Electrolyte Properties for Sodium-Ion Batteries in Handbook of Sodium-Ion Batteries.
NEW RESEARCH ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN SMALL
27 August 2022
Our latest work on carbon anodes for alkali ion battery materials has been published in Small. In this work, we explore the binding and breakdown of ethylene carbonate on hard carbon showing how the surface termination, roughness, and defects influence the initial liquid solid interaction and facilitate breakdown.
REVIEW ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN ADVANCED ENERGY MATERIALS
17 May 2022
Computational materials design has greatly accelerated the alkali-ion battery field. Publishing in Advanced Energy Material, we present a review article that shows that computational modeling is an integral part of the battery research environment and a powerful tool to support experimental studies, to unravel important atomic scale properties and features to gain fundamental understanding of properties and mechanisms that are challenging to obtain solely from experimental analysis and measurements.
WISE FELLOWSHIP
15 April 2022
Emilia Olsson has received a Women in Science Excel (WISE) grant amounting to 250.000 euros from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). With her WISE Fellowship, Olsson and her team will conduct atomic-scale modeling of solid-state materials to explore and design materials for EUV lithography. Directly probing the materials properties and mechanisms that lead to enhanced and limited performance is challenging. The group will develop a computational framework to probe the effect of initial surface structure and deposition on interface formation. These models will allow degradation pathways to be explored at different interface systems, permitting for mitigation and optimisation.
NEW COLLABORATIVE EXPERIMENTAL AND COMPUTATIONAL PAPER ON MICRO-MESOPOROUS HARD CARBONS AS SODIUM-ION BATTERY ANODES
28 November 2021
Continuing the collaboration sodium ion battery carbon anodes, our latest paper is now available in Advanced Materials and Interfaces investigating hard carbons with tailored bimodal porosities as sodium-ion anodes. We show that the nature of the innermost solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) sub-layer controls the performance. F-containing salts enable a stable SEI, yet enhanced electrolyte decomposition seems unavoidable in carbonate-based solvents compared to ether-based systems.
MOVE TO ARCNL AND UVA
1 September 2021
On the 1st September, Emilia Olsson started as a group leader at the Advanced Research Center for Nanolithography and a tenure track assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam. Starting up our new group called Materials Theory and Modeling, we will focus on atomic-scale modeling of solid-state materials and materials discovery. For novel lithography technologies, materials are pushed to extreme limits, which requires atomic level understanding in order to predict, comprehend, and control their properties.
Using cutting-edge density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics (MD) modeling techniques, the group will conduct simulations of bulk, surface, thin-films, and interface systems to explore and design novel materials for EUV lithography. These atomic-scale insights will enable novel candidate materials, and breakdown/performance limiting mechanisms in current materials, to be identified, leading to the development of improved materials for EUV lithography.
MRS SPRING MEETING 2021
17 April 2021
Emilia Olsson gave one pre-recorded and one live contributed talk at the virtual Materials Research Society Spring Meeting 2021.
TWO NEW PUBLICATIONS
30th September 2020
Our two latest papers on hard carbon anodes for sodium ion batteries have been published in Energy and Environmental Science and ACS Applied Energy Materials.
CONFERENCE PRESENTATION
25th July 2019
I am giving a talk on Carbon-Based Anode Materials for Alkali Metal Ion Batteries–Atomic Scale Studies of Defects, Functional Groups, and Electrolytes and Their Impact on Metal Storage and Diffusion at the Electrochemical Conference on Energy and the Environment in Glasgow, Scotland.
VISITING RESEARCHER
March 2019
I am joining the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London as a visiting researcher in the Titirici group.