The project is related to the chemical properties of the heaviest elements of the periodic table – the transactinides.
Transactinide series of elements starts with Rf (Z=104) and ends at the up to now heaviest synthesized element with Z=118. Theoretical calculations of atomic properties predict increasingly strong relativistic effects in the electron shells of these elements.The field of the high charged nucleus modifies the electronic structure of transactinides in a way that their chemical properties could be very different from the properties of other elements in the same group of the periodic table. The chemical investigation of such elements is a very challenging task due to the very low production rate of the particular used isotopes (few per week) and, therefore, the conduction of long term experiments under stable conditions.
Not only the experimental part but also the data processing and interpretation is a complicated task, where large data amounts must be handled and Monte-Carlo (MC) simulation about the movement of the wanted elements within the used experimental setup must be carried out. The power of present days available GPUs can speed up this MC simulation tremendously and, therefore, a more detailed description of the involved processes can be now implemented into the program code.
We are looking for a student interested in CUDA-programming of NVIDIA graphic cards. The main task of the work is the speed optimized implementation of a random walk algorithm for the movement through a themochromatographic column as well as the adsorption, desorption and the radioactive decay of a single atom.
The work will be carried out in a collaboration between the
Chair of Computational Science, the Chair of Radiochemistry at the University of Bern and the group of Heavy Elements research at the Laboratory of Radiochemistry and Environmental Chemistry at the Paul Scherrer Institut.