Computational Mineral Physics

‘This helpful tutorial and text fills a hole in the literature and should be of interest in fields ranging from solid state chemistry to materials science and engineering, as well as its primary target audience in geophysics. Topics covered range from crystallography to viscosity to optics. Each of the areas covered could be one or more books on its own, but here they are drawn together as an accessible introduction for many areas of computational materials research. Carefully chosen references should allow the researcher to explore farther, and there is sufficient background material that students will be able to get beyond the ‘black box’ stage and understand if their results are converged and meaningful. Even experienced researchers will find this volume useful as a reference.’ Ronald Cohen, Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science

Razvan Caracas is a computational mineral physicist with a background in both geology and materials sciences. He was awarded a Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Louvain prior to a post-doctoral position at the University of Minnesota, a Carnegie Fellowship at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and a Humboldt Fellowship at the University of Bayreuth. He is a Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America, a recipient of the Dana Medal of the same society, and a member of the Academia Europaea. He is presently a senior researcher at the Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris, working on a wide range of topics in planetary mineralogy, going from the supercritical state that dominated the protolunar disk, to the internal structure of exoplanets. With the help of atomistic simulations, his work explores the early Earth’s evolution – helping to decipher the condensation of the Earth and the Moon, the formation of the primordial atmosphere, and exploring what conditions planets must fulfil to make prebiotic chemistry thrive.