Professor Horsfield’s research focuses on electrons that are out of equilibrium. There are several active projects at the moment. A long standing one is to understand structural materials for hydrogen fusion power plants: the electrons are taken out of equilibrium by fast particles that collide with the walls. A major focus at the moment is the aqueous corrosion of metals. This includes the atomistic simulation of reactions at electrodes under a bias. He is also investigating a single molecule chemical sensor that seeks to implement the human olfactory mechanism proposed by Turin (inelastic electron tunnelling spectroscopy). The primary research methodology I use is a variant of Density Functional Tight Binding called Gaussian Tight Binding: it is implemented in the program Plato. For open boundary simulations I primarily use the Hairy Probe methodology.
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