CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, and the CSC (Chinese Scholarship Council) are currently offering positions for Chinese PhD students (PhDs) and Senior Visiting Scientists (Scholars) to work in Australia.

Among many projects on offer, this project is focused on High-throughput Quantum Simulation of Silicon Quantum Dots.

Perfectly monodispersed samples of Si quantum dots, like most nanostructures, do exist in reality. In particular, the concentration, configuration and distribution of functional defects, such as substitutional phosphorus, exhibits massive variation. To understand the probability distribution of phosphorus defects and the impact they have on the stability of the systems as a whole, large-scale high-throughput quantum mechanical computations are required. By implementing an in-house developed Hybrid HPC/Big Data platform, different level quantum simulations will be benchmarked under direction of the supervisor (Dr Baichuan Sun, Data Scientist) and senior research scientists.

More specifically, this project involves:

• HPC operation (running simulations),
• Scientific data processing/statistical analysis/visualisation,
• Documenting research results,
• Reviewing literature and drafting manuscripts, etc.

To be competitive you will have skills and experience in electronic structure simulations, High Performance Computing (HPC), and be familiar with LAMMPS, DFTB+, SIESTA or GAMESS.

PhDs or Scholars will develop skills in the following areas:

• Informatics: implement hybrid HPC+Big Data platform and benchmark high-throughput quantum-based simulations at different levels on Silicon Quantum Dot dataset.
• Publications: co-/author high impact publications based on the resulted big dataset.
• Collaboration: work with leading scientists and informaticians in computational nanoscience, which would highly benefit the visitor’s future research career path.

This scholarships includes international airfares and living allowances for 12-24 months for PhDs and 3-12 months for Scholars; as well as “operational costs” such as access to computers, office, lab space etc.  Salaries are covered by the home institution.

The process for selection involves nominations from CSIRO and the home institution in China, but begins by contacting the project leader, Baichuan Sun ([email protected]) for more information.