Professor Volker Heine
Emeritus Fellow
What is your subject and specific area of study?
Theoretical physics of materials at the atomic level, including a lot of computer simulation to investigate structures, properties and processes. Areas of application includes minerals (rocks), metals and alloys, and surfaces of solids. The computer simulations have to solve the full quantum mechanics of the atomic electrons to describe the bonds between the atoms, and how bonds are broken and new ones formed during some process.
I will be 80 next year and have been out of active research for some time, but I remain very active in helping to build durable European cooperation in my field because one country is not a large enough unit to have all the latest expertise in the very sophisticated and rapidly moving subject of quantum mechanical computer simulation.
What makes Clare College such a good place to study your subject?
Well, the Fellows who are such fantastically good physicists and teachers! And all the other reasons that make Clare a very dynamic and happy community. I came to Clare having done my undergraduate study at Otago University, New Zealand, where I was very much a large pebble on a small beach, and where the academic pressure was so low that I had time to write a little research paper on my own ideas - something I would not have been able to do as a Cambridge undergraduate! So, if you don't get a place at Clare, there are plenty of other places where you are likely to thrive and have an enjoyable time, and where you will be given different opportunities. And you can always apply again as a graduate student.
An example of recent work, not my own.
Reaction scheme for adsorption of CO on a catalytic surface
(after SM Opalka et al. J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 20 (2008) 064237)