After surviving week five, the sixth week of the academic year feels almost relaxing. However, all the effort is worth it, and I was happy to hear the students of our materiomics program at UHasselt appreciate the effort put into creating their classes, during an evaluation meeting.
The evolution of the Z position of a Be atom on Graphene. Periodic cell with 10 Angstrom vacuum along z direction. Z position is given in direct coordinates (0…1), with the graphene sheet positioned at z=0 (=1). The Be atom is van der Waals bonded, and moves through the vacuum to attach to the “bottom” side of the sheet, though originally positioned at the “top” side.
Though the week was not as intense as the week before does not mean there were no classes at all. The second bachelor students in chemistry continued their studies of particles in simple potentials though the study of a particle in a square infinite potential well during the course introduction to quantum chemistry. During the course quantum and computational chemistry, the third bachelor chemistry, the He atom was now studied by means of the variational method, introducing the concepts of effective nuclear charge and shielding in a natural way.
While the bachelor students could take a backseat approach during the lectures (except for calculating some bbracket integrals), the master materiomics students had to do most of the heavy lifting during their classes. For the course on Density Functional Theory there was response lecture as well as a lab-session where they studied the dynamics of Be on and around graphene, while the first master students had their second presentation & discussion session on the computational aspects of the papers studied in the course Properties of functional materials.
At the end of this week, we added another 11h of live classes and ~2h of video lectures, putting our semester total at 85h of live lectures. Upwards and onward to week 7.
