The University of Tartu, Estonia is looking for prospective candidates for a PhD project in the field of computational physics / computational materials science.

The project titled "First Principles Electronic Structure Calculations for Determining the Principle of Operation of Multicomponent Ultrafast Scintillators," addresses the fundamental properties of inorganic hexafluoride scintillators (K2GeF6, K2SiF6, BaGeF6). The PhD student will be supervised by Dr. Juhan Matthias Kahk and Professor Marco Kirm (University of Tartu, Estonia), and Professor Johannes Lischner (Imperial College London). The doctoral project is part of the Horizon Europe Twinning Project EXANST, a collaboration between the University of Tartu, MAX-IV Laboratory, Forschungszentrum Jülich, and Imperial College London.

The project aims to elucidate the operating principles of the specified scintillators, focusing on scintillation yield and response time. The PhD student will use first-principles electronic structure methods such as Density Functional Theory and Green’s Function Theory (GW, Bethe-Salpeter equation) to calculate theoretical spectra of these materials, including photoemission, optical absorption, and luminescence spectra. The results will be compared to relevant experimental results.

If the computational methods are able to successfully replicate the experimental luminescence properties of the hexafluoride scintillators, in the future, similar calculations can be used to identify other promising materials with a high transition probability for the desirable luminescence transition, and low probabilities for competing processes such as other radiative or non-radiative decay channels.

The computational infrastructure comprises the X-ray Spectroscopy Laboratory computing server, UT Rocket cluster, and LUMI High-Performance Computing system. The PhD project is closely related to three financed research projects: the Horizon Europe Twinning Project EXANST, the Center of Excellence in Sustainable Green Hydrogen and Energy Technologies, and the Horizon Europe Staff Exchanges project BETTERXPS.

Formal applications will be accepted from May 1st to May 15th, 2024 via https://estonia.dreamapply.com/

Further information on the application process is available at https://ut.ee/en/content/phd-admissions#applying

Please contact Dr Juhan Matthias Kahk at [email protected] if you have any additional questions about this position.