Dr Kang Wang and Professor Marina Filip, from the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, were awarded an NVIDIA Academic Grant to support research into the behaviour of excitons – bound pairs of electrons and their associated 'holes' that form when light is absorbed by a material – in complex semiconductors. The award, part of NVIDIA's Academic Grant Programme, provides the team with exclusive access to eight NVIDIA H100 GPUs, among the most advanced graphics processing chips available, for six months, amounting to more than 30,000 GPU hours.
The computing power will allow Dr Wang and Professor Filip to combine GPU-accelerated first-principles calculations of excited electronic states with machine-learning-based molecular dynamics, a technique that uses trained models to simulate how atoms move over time without the full computational cost of traditional methods. Together, these tools will let the team study how excitons behave in heterogeneous organic-inorganic semiconductors.
The project aims to develop a GPU-enabled workflow for studying excited-state dynamics in these complex materials, laying the groundwork for future research into the design and discovery of new semiconductors for use in optoelectronics and energy-harvesting technologies such as solar cells and LEDs.
'We are very excited to have access to these world-leading computing resources,' commented Professor Filip. 'This is a fantastic opportunity to accelerate our efforts to understand light-matter interactions in unconventional semiconductors, and to build predictive frameworks for the design and discover new functional semiconductors for optoelectronic applications.'