General Seminar: Dr. Ivan Oleynik

Abstract: Properties of carbon at extreme pressures and temperatures are of critical importance for constructing interior models of carbon-rich exoplanets. Among the questions that have long perplexed the scientific community are the existence and potential synthesis of high-pressure post-diamond carbon phases, and the inelastic response of diamond to strong shock compression. In particular, very recent ramp compression and X-Ray diffraction experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) challenged theoretical prediction of the existence of a high-pressure BC8 post-diamond phase by compressing diamond to extreme pressures up to 20 Mbar. In this talk, Dr. Oleynik will describe recent advances in simulating atomic-scale dynamics of material’s response at experimental time and length scales using quantum-accurate, billion-atom molecular dynamics simulations with machine-learning models of interatomic interactions and employing the most powerful computers in the world. Specifically, Oleynik will focus on atomic-scale mechanisms of solid-solid and solid-liquid phase transitions of carbon and nature of inelastic deformations in diamond. These transformative simulations guide our experimental campaigns at NIF, Omega, Z, and EuXFEL facilities towards observing predicted phenomena.

Speaker bio: Ivan Oleynik is a professor at the department of physics, University of South Florida. His research focuses on studies of materials at extreme pressures and temperatures by advanced theory, simulations and experiment. He is also best known for design and prediction of properties of novel materials, and development of new methods for materials simulations at atomistic level. He leads several experimental teams to perform experiments at National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia’s Z pulsed power facility, Omega laser facility at Laboratory of Laser Energetics to realize groundbreaking predictions from his simulations. He also spearheads several computational campaigns at DOE’s exascale supercomputers, securing the largest computing allocations awarded by DOE’s ASCR Leadership Class Computing Challenge (ALCC) and the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) programs.

Ivan Oleynik received his PhD in Shock Physics from Semenov Institute of Chemical Physics RAS. He was a Royal Society research fellow at the University of Bath, UK, and a senior research scientist at the University of Oxford before joining the Physics faculty at USF in 2002. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society (APS), and the American Vacuum Society. From 2018 to 2022, he led the APS Topical Group on Shock Compression of Condensed Matter, a unit of APS aimed at promoting the science of matter at extreme conditions. Ivan also led a team of computational scientists that earned a 2021 Gordon Bell Prize finalist nomination for record-breaking billion-atom simulations of carbon at extreme conditions and experimental time and length scales.