Andrea Dal Corso

E-mail

 dalcorso (at) sissa.it

Office

 A 404

Web

 http://people.sissa.it/~dalcorso

Tel

 +39 040 3787 428

Fax

 +39 040 3787 249

Vita

Andrea Dal Corso, born in 1965,  is an associate professor in the condensed matter group since 2002. After obtaining the PhD in condensed matter theory  from SISSA in 1993, he spent five years at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne  in the Institute Romand de Recherche Numérique en Physique de Matériaux (IRRMA) as a post-doctoral researcher. He joined the SISSA group in 1998 as a ricercatore a contratto 3+3. ADC is a senior developer (active since 1991) of the Quantum ESPRESSO project.

Research

The aim of ADC’s research is to extend the methods based on density functional theory to deal with difficult systems and novel properties. PWscf, PHONON, PWcond, and atomic, now part of the Quantum ESPRESSO package, are computational codes for the investigation of the structural, electronic and magnetic properties of materials and nanostructures and the calculation of their linear response properties. Part of ADC’s activity aims at improving these codes. He has generalized density functional perturbation theory to the ultrasoft pseudopotentials  and, in recent years,  he has devoted a particular effort  to the description of relativistic effects such as spin-orbit coupling by plane waves and pseudopotentials. Applications include bulk materials, transition and noble metal surfaces, clean and with adsorbates,  and nanostructures such as metallic nanocontacts and nanowires. In the following years this reseach will continue along the following lines:

  1. Relativistic effects in solids, surfaces, and nanostructures. In 2009-2010 I have  tackled the problem of the fully relativistic generalization of the  projector augmented wave (PAW) method. I showed that the equations of relativistic spin-density functional theory for four component spinors, rewritten via the PAW method, can be transformed into equations for two component pseudo spinors introducing only errors of order 1/c2 (here c is the speed of light). In the following years, I plan to apply this new method to some relevant problems. Moreover, further effort is necessary to consolidate the method and to make it easily usable. It is necessary to develop the fully relativistic pseudopotentials and PAW data-sets and several parts of the Quantum ESPRESSO package need to be generalized to the new method. Some work has been already carried out, for instance I have extended the linear response theory to the PAW method in the scalar relativistic case, and I have started a systematic development of the pseudopotentials, but much more work is needed to complete this project.
  2. Software engineering. The work on the Quantum ESPRESSO package will continue with further cleaning and simplification of the PHONON and atomic codes and several other improvements that are needed to enhance their usability.

Publications

ADC is the author of about 70 scientific papers published in international journals and refereed conference proceedings (74 on ISI: 1 renowned, >500 quotes;  1 famous, 250-499 quotes; 2 very well know, 100-249 quotes). These papers have been cited more than 3,300 times in the international literature (H index 28, source: ISI, March 2011).

Among ADC’s papers, the most significant include:

  1. A. Dal Corso, Projector augmented-wave method: application to relativistic spin-density functional theory, Phys. Rev. B 82, 075116 (2010).
  2. A. Dal Corso, Density functional perturbation theory within the projector augmented-wave method, Phys. Rev. B 81, 075123 (2010).
  3. P. Giannozzi, et al., Quantum ESPRESSO: a modular and open-source software project for quantum simulations of materials, J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 21, 395502 (2009).
  4. A. Dal Corso, Density functional perturbation theory for lattice dynamics with fully relativistic ultrasoft pseudopotentials: application to fcc-Pt and fcc-Au, Phys. Rev. B 76, 054308 (2007).
  5. A. Dal Corso and A. Mosca Conte, Spin-orbit coupling with ultrasoft pseudopotentials: application to Au and Pt, Phys. Rev. B 71, 115106 (2005).
  6. A. Smogunov, A. Dal Corso, and E. Tosatti, Ballistic conductance of magnetic Co and Ni nanowires with ultrasoft pseudo-potentials, Phys. Rev. B 70, 045417 (2004).
  7. J. Tobik and A. Dal Corso, Electric fields with ultrasoft pseudo-potentials: applications to benzene and anthracene, Jour. of Chem. Phys. 120, 9934 (2004).
  8. S. Baroni, S. de Gironcoli, A. Dal Corso, and P. Giannozzi, Phonons and related properties of extended systems from density functional perturbation theory, Rev. Mod. Phys. 73, 515 (2001).
  9. A. Dal Corso, Density functional perturbation theory with ultrasoft pseudopotentials, Phys. Rev. B 64, 235118 (2001).
  10. A. Dal Corso and S. de Gironcoli, Ab-initio phonon dispersions of Fe and Ni, Phys. Rev. B 62, 273 (2000).

A complete list of ADC’s scientific papers can be found here.