As a farewell to Lucas’s all-too-short visit, the FAST group headed out yet again to the punts — but this time, to race up and down the River Cam as quickly as possible — and do some sightseeing along the way. We also had a formal dinner at Gonville & Caius College last week, with […]
Does water become more or less reactive when squeezed into gaps just a few molecules wide? Literature has disagreed for years. Using enhanced sampling molecular dynamics with machine-learned potentials, we found a surprisingly clean answer: confinement on its own doesn’t change water’s reactivity. Once you account for pressure and chemical potential, the apparent “confinement effect” […]
A warm welcome to our newest batch of PhD students: Willem Farmilo and Joe Hart, who both joined in October 2025, and Thenmozhi Elango (part-time PhD), who was transferred into our group in February this year. Willem will be studying hydrogen bond networks in ice systems, with a view towards the diffusivity of hydrogen bonding […]
Clays are everywhere — from soil and contaminant transport to emerging energy technologies. But at the molecular level, the reactivity of their edge surfaces remains underexplored. In this work, now published as J. Phys. Chem. Lett. (2026) 17, 9, 2679–2688, we show that clay edges are not static arrays of functional groups, but dynamic proton-conducting […]
Niamh O’Neill undertook her viva today, and passed with minor corrections — many congratulations to Dr. O’Neill! During her tenure with the FAST group, Niamh’s research focused on studying ion paring interactions at chemical accuracy and beyond, as well as scaling coupled cluster calculations for high-accuracy condensed phase simulations. She will be starting a postdoc […]
Sam G.H. Brookes undertook his viva today morning, and passed with minor corrections — many congratulations to Dr. Brookes! Sam represents the first ever PhD student to graduate from the FAST group, setting a trend for future FAST members to follow! Pictured below is Sam and his “PhD hat” (built by his fellow ICE group […]
Machine learning potentials and foundation models are changing atomistic simulation — but to truly raise the bar, we need to break out of the standard DFT reference. Our new paper, published as J. Chem. Theory Comput. (2025) 21, 22, 11710–11720, pushes that frontier: we demonstrate a Δ-learning route towards coupled-cluster accuracy for the condensed phase, […]
We had a great time in Lausanne for the 7th Psi-k conference, held at the SwissTech Convention Centre, EPFL across 25 to 28 August 2025, with a week full of interesting talks, insightful discussions, and wonderful science! Thank you to the Psi-k organising committee for the excellent event, we very much enjoyed keeping up-to-date with […]
In this study, we uncovered a previously unknown reaction mechanism, showing that CO₂ can react at the interface with similar energetics to the bulk phase. This finding challenges the common assumption that surface reactions are suppressed, and has important implications for climate models and our understanding of carbon uptake by the oceans. Congratulations to Sam, […]
To celebrate Lars’s successful PhD viva, the FAST group headed out to the punts to drift lazily down the River Cam (after all, what better way is there to study water, than to simply float on it?). Much fun was had, with a few of us taking turns to push the really big stick around […]