Graduate Student Recognized by APS Forum

By Alex Demkov (demkov@physics.utexas.edu)

Alex Slepko, a graduate student in the Department of Physics, has been recognized with the Ken Hass Best Student Paper in Applied Physics from the Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics (FIAP) of the American Physical Society at the organization’s March 2013 meeting for his paper “Electrical Resistivity in Metals and Metallic Alloys from First Principles.” The award is named in honor of the late Dr. Hass, who was the director of the Physical Sciences Labs at Ford Motors. FIAP established the award in his memory a few years ago.

The work is computational and is aimed at modeling the electrical transport properties of metals and alloys using the Boltzmann transport formalism with the electron-phonon scattering from first principles, using density functional theory. The specific implementation is based on the widely used VASP code. The method is expected to add more realism to the new generation of the technology computer-aided design (TCAD) tools. A part of this work has been done during Alex’s internship at Intel last summer.

Alex is the sixth-year graduate student in the Demkov group. His undergraduate degree is from the Ulm University in Germany. He divides his research interests between transport properties of contact materials such as various silicide alloys and biomaterials such as hydroxiapatite. The main research tool he uses now is first principles simulations. Alex is an expert in density functional calculations, and has experience with the bulk electronic structure calculations, modeling of the elastic properties of materials, modeling interfaces and surfaces, computing the Schottky barrier, phonon dispersion and structural phase transitions. In the summer of 2012, Alex was Awarded Intel Graduate internship. After graduation this spring, Alex will be joining the Intel R&D organization in Oregon.

For additional information, visit: http://www.aps.org/units/fiap/

Originally published Tuesday, March 26, 2013