Supervisors: Peter Brommer (Engineering), Albert Bartok-Partay (Physics and Engineering)

Laser ablation, the removal of material with intense light pulses, is an important subtractive manufacturing technique. Femtosecond (10^-15 s) laser pulses can result in superior quality of e.g. drilled holes, but they pose a formidable modelling challenge, as the laser drives the electrons in the system to extreme temperatures before the atoms can react. For technologically interesting nanostructured alloys (used e.g. in turbine blades), there are no models that can cope with these conditions. Your task (in collaboration with international partners University of Stuttgart and the openKIM project) is to derive such a model from fundamental data and integrate it into openKIM, a framework for certified simulations on an atomic scale.