Nicholas Brawand

  • Physics
  • Colorado School of Mines
    Golden, CO 80401
    USA

Education

  • B.S. Engineering Physics

Research

  • Novel architecture in nanostructure silicon.

As an undergraduate, I remember looking at web pages like this one and feeling like the description of what the person does for research was always vague. Here I would like to provide a quick tutorial on some of the tools I use for my research.

First tool I use is Materials Visualizer. This costs money but Avogadro (linked below) is free and easy to use. Using Materials Visualizer I can draw any molecule that I want to study. For example, I am interested in Silane.

Silane

I constructed this using Materials Visualizer but you can do the same with Avogadro. Now that we have our Silane molecule we would like to find the energy difference between its lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) and its highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO). As you can imagine, the Hamiltonian for this system is very complex. To get around this we will have Ra perform a density functional theory calculation to tell us our eigenvalues. The program that we use to do this is called Siesta. Siesta is free and can be downloaded from their website. I have provided the link below. On their website you will find tutorials that will help you get started with your own research. In fact, you can perform DFT calculations on your own computer at home! Remember though, the larger the structure, the longer it will take to complete the calculation.

After performing the calculation, my results were,

  • HOMO= -8.407 (eV)
  • LUMO= 0.815 (eV)

So our band gap energy is 9.222 eV. Using Materials Visualizer we can also look at isosurface plots of these orbitals.

Silane

Here is an isosurface plot of the highest occupied molecular orbital.

lumo Silane

Here is an isosurface plot of the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital.

If your not sure what type of research you would like to do for senior design but you find this interesting, download Siesta or Orca (free easy to use DFT software) and run your own calculations.

Lesson Plans

Euler circuit lesson plan

RC circuit lesson plan

Egg drop lesson plan

Links

Siesta-DFT Software

Avogadro-a free molecule editor

A Mathematica notebook exploring the idea of an inverse lattice

A simple system you don't see in quantum one but should

Test game for the APS kids

Rotation for the APS kids

Things About Me

My full name is Nicholas Peter Brawand. I graduated with my bachelor's in physics from the Colorado School of Mines. During the summers I work for Boeing. Last summer I had the pleasure of working on a simulator with a team of software engineers. I love programming and working with computers, so computational physics suits me well. Right now I am working on my second degree in physics with Mark Lusk as my adviser. I spend most of my time on my studies but to be honest, I find a lot of joy in them.

Interests

  • Density Functional Theory
  • Solid State Physics
  • Quantum Mechanics
  • Covenant Theology
  • HTML!
  • Teaching math and physics
  • Learning math and physics

Hobbies

  • Weightlifting
  • Running
  • Ruining perfectly good motorcycles