PhD projects in Extreme Conditions Physics
Coronavirus (Covid-19) updates
If you are a prospective student please see the University’s Covid-19 webpages for up-to-date details, advice and support.
About Extreme Conditions Physics
We study how materials react and change when being subjected to extremes of pressure, temperature, fields and strain. We use diamond anvils or large lasers to create high pressures, liquid He cooling and laser heating to change temperatures, and x-rays, neutrons and optical spectroscopy to study how the materials change. Understanding our observations is aided by computation and simulation, using methods such as electronic structure calculations, classical and quantum molecular dynamics.
Available PhD projects
A list of current PhD projects in Extreme Conditions is shown below. Click on each project to find out more about the project, its supervisor(s) and its research area(s).
- Accessing Planetary Interior Conditions Through Rapid Compression
- Alloys in the Earth's core
- Benchmarking DFT at extreme pressures
- Better Thermoelectric Materials Through High Pressure
- Breaking the 10 GPa ‘Pressure Barrier’ in Organic Solids
- Crystal structure prediction from free energies
- Density functional theory
- Effect Of Pressure On Molten Silicate Miscibility Gaps
- Energy Transport through Earth's Deep Interior
- f-electron metals at extreme conditions: theory
- Gas Hydrates
- Giant planets in the experimental laboratory: revealing the hidden properties of the planetary interiors.
- High-Pressure Alchemy: Turning Simple Metals into Complex Non-Metals
- Hot Dense Hydrogen
- Ice and Water
- Machine learning accelerated studies of dense planetary matter
- Machine Learning interatomic forcefields for shockwaves
- Micro-Confinement of Dense Energetic Plasmas
- Nanofabrication as a Route to Ultrahigh Pressures
- Planetary Mineralogy
- Probing f-electron Physics at Extreme Densities
- Probing the Behaviour of Matter at Extreme Densities Using Dynamic Compression
- Quantum Effects in Hydrogen
- Quantum simulations of rocky planet interiors
- Studies of the Phase Diagrams of Hydrogen and Deuterium
- Synthesis of Novel Materials at Extreme Conditions
- Synthesis of novel materials at extreme conditions
- Transforming Matter with Powerful Lasers: Uncovering Stars and Planets in the Laboratory
- Using Nitrogen for Novel Rocket Propellant and Superhard Materials