Phase-Field Crystal Research
How crystals deform and yield — a computational-physics thread from my PhD, still active through co-supervision and the ComFiT library.
In my PhD at the University of Oslo, supervised by Prof. Luiza Angheluta, I worked on phase-field crystal (PFC) modeling — a way of simulating crystal structure at the level of individual atomic planes, but on the slow, diffusive timescales where deformation and plasticity actually happen. The central question: how do grain boundaries move, how do dislocations nucleate and glide, and what does that tell us about how a material yields under stress? The papers below span that work, from the underlying field theory to its numerical evaluation.
Papers
ComFiT — a field-theory simulation library
After finishing the PhD, my co-PhD student Jonas Rønning and I built ComFiT together — an open-source Python library for simulating computational field theory with topological defects, including the phase-field crystal models from this research. It has full documentation and test coverage, and is published in the Journal of Open Source Software (see the paper below).
Co-supervisor — student projects
I currently co-supervise two students at the University of Oslo, working with computational field-theory methods built on the ComFiT framework.