Professor Mike Finnis, Chair in Materials Theory and Simulation, presents his Inaugural Lecture: ‘Atoms at interfaces, theory and simulation from Gibbs to Gates’.

What do the sex life of a water beetle, the Giants Causeway, the Titanic disaster and a computer microchip have in common? And why should they fascinate a theoretical physicist turned materials scientist like me? The answer is interfaces, more precisely the interfacial energies on which these phenomena and countless others have depended, and which have repeatedly delighted and surprised us. Most of the thermodynamics relevant to this topic was meticulously worked out about 150 years ago in New Haven Connecticut by Josiah Willard Gibbs. Nowadays theorists can calculate the properties of atoms and experimentalists can see them, so that structures and properties of interfaces can be understood at an atomic scale. I will describe some highlights of my research in this field, where atomic scale structure and thermodynamics meet.

Since my first degree in Theoretical Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, I have worked mainly as a theoretician in materials science, initially for the Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell. In 1988 I moved to Berlin, and spent two years at the Fritz-Haber-Institut, followed by five years at the Max-Planck-Institut für Metallforschung in Stuttgart, where I learned about the science of interfaces, and led a small theory group collaborating with electron microscopists. The following ten years I spent in the Atomistic Simulation Group (now Centre) at Queen’s University Belfast, of which I was a founding member and head, until I moved to Imperial in January 2006.