Scientific Highlights from the Ψk Network: Towards Atomistic Materials Design

Abstract

AbstractThe Ψk network aims at encompassing the whole community of European groups working in the area of ab‐initio materials modelling, including very many small groups and isolated researchers. Historically, the activities started in the 1980s in Trieste with the workshop series entitled “Total Energies and Forces”. Since then, it has operated on the European level in various forms, with funding from various EC/EU and ESF sources, beginning more than 10 years ago with the EC's Human Capital and Mobility Programme. In that time, Ψk has done much to make Europe the leading area in the world for research in atomic‐scale ab‐initio computer simulation of all types of materials, their structures, properties, and processes. To a large extent, this has been done by nurturing scientific excellence and collaboration in what might be called “the Ψk family”. The Ψk Network is presently organized around 15 topical working groups. Over the years, the Ψk network organized three large scale conferences in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany (1996, 2000, 2005), attended by hundreds of scientists from all over the world. The next Ψk Conference is to be organized in Berlin in 2010. These Ψk Conferences are unique events fully dedicated to the ab‐initio research. In addition, the network organizes a variety of meetings and topical workshops every year.The core activities of the Ψk network involve editing every two months a Ψk newsletter with typically more than 100 pages, which contains a “Scientific Highlight”, announcements of conferences, workshops and vacant positions, news of various ESF and EU funded networks, including reports on workshops, and abstracts of submitted papers. The Ψk has its own web pages (http://psi‐k.dl.ac.uk) which inform about the Network, its structure, and how to get involved in Ψk activities. These web pages are also the repository of the Ψk newsletters and Scientific Highlights and details about the Ψk Workshops of the most recent years. The Ψk mailing list contains about 1700 e‐mail addresses from across the world, and all the important information about a variety of activities of the network is distributed across this list on a daily basis.The “Scientific Highlights” of the Ψk newsletters reflect the scientific activities of the network and aim at presenting reviews and current developments in the field. This special issue of physica status solidi (b) gives a collection of some of the most recent Highlight contributions to the Ψk newsletter. All manuscripts originally posted on the Ψk server were peer‐reviewed by two referees and accepted according to the standards of pss. They are published here partly in revised or updated version. We hope that the readership of the journal will benefit from the quality of the research they report on and the high level of the presentations.