This year, the group is expanding with two new recruits. We are happy to welcome Afaf Hrif as PhD student co-supervised with Mathieu Guerain and Gilberto Alou as postdoctoral researcher.

Very excited to promote our most recent paper where we use our PLIP+Q MLIP to study growth mechanisms in ZnO nanoparticle following atom by atom deposition. We show that (1) our simple approach for long-range interactions remains reliable for such complex simulation and (2) growth can induce phase transition from a metastable state.

Kudos to all of the participants of this exciting work: Quentin Gromoff, Carlos R. Salazar, Magali BENOIT and Jacek Goniakowski

Very happy to welcome Dr. Caroline Traisnel as a postdoctoral researcher in our team. She is an expert in DFT modelling and will focus on building a DFT-accurate database for ZnxCuyO together with our long term collaborator and friend Dr. Jacek Goniakowski.

For those who were unable to make the trip to Corsica but are interested, my entire presentation was filmed. The video is now available on YouTube!

Happy to officially welcome Harry and Daniela in the group as Master 2 student. They will respectively work on Ice nucleation and on Gold/Iron MLIP. Hopefully if everything goes well on both side, they will be able to also start their PhD with us in Autumn.

🚀 3-Year Postdoc: ML-Assisted Nanoparticle Simulations at UMET, University of Lille! 🔬 Dive into phase transitions of metallic alloys and oxides using machine-learning potentials and rare-event sampling. 📈 Benefit from direct PI mentorship and dedicated support for permanent researcher applications. 🌍 Thrive in Lille—a bike-friendly European hub just 1 hour from Paris, London, and Brussels. 📩 Apply now: Send your CV and cover letter to join our agile, high-impact team!

Can a system as thoroughly studied as the Lennard-Jones gas still reveal intriguing phenomena? In a collaboration with the Laboratoire de Physique de la Matière Condensée published in Phys Rev Letters, we employed Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations and rare-event sampling to investigate liquid nucleation from the vapor phase. Contrary to the predictions of Classical Nucleation Theory, our results demonstrate that critical clusters nucleate at a density significantly different from that of the macroscopic equilibrium liquid. We rationalize these numerical findings using a two-variable nucleation theory that is both accessible and highly effective.

Proud that Quentin Gromoff succesfully defended his thesis named: “Machine Learning Approaches to the Simulation of Nanoparticle Crystallization“. Massive thank you to his PhD committee including Jérôme Creuze, Christinne Mottet, Mathias Rapacioli and Emilie Gaudry. Special thank as well to my partner in crime Magali Benoit for the co-supervision.

Very excited to announce that our projet NanoPHIA is now funded by the PEPR Diadem! We will receive 905k€ to work on the formation process in physical synthesis of nanoparticles by exploiting AI to couple characterisation, in-situ measurement and simulations. It will a collaboration with CEMES, INSP and ILM and 4 postdocs will be hired soon to do both simulations and experiments.

As every year, we are hiring summer internship students. If you are interested in working around machine-learning, atomistic simulations, nanoparticle or nucleation, please feel free to send me CV and cover letter. More info here and here.