Connor Wilson

Background

About Connor Wilson

About me - I'm a first-year PhD student in theoretical physics at Brock University, where I'm conducting research into the electrical conductivity of twisted bilayer graphene and other van der Waals heterostructures using the Landauer-Buttiker formalism. I received my MSc in experimental condensed matter and materials science from Brock in Oct. In my free time, I can often be found cycling and exploring the local trails for some well-hidden geocaches. I also enjoy playing the guitar (although it's definitely not my strong suit!) Ongoing research - Despite some eighty years of active investigation, and having the third-simplest electronic configuration on the periodic table, the low-temperature crystal structure of lithium has not been completely resolved in experiment. Recently, I collaborated on a project to provide a theoretical justification for the ambiguity in the experimentally-determined crystal structure. By making several physically-motivated assumptions about the electronic conduction processes in lithium, we were able to show that all close-packed crystal structures lead to the same electronic ground-state energy. Our findings are now available as a preprint on the arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15865 Past research - My MSc thesis investigated the character of atomic vibrations in an emergent class of functional materials known as high-entropy oxides (HEOs) which have garnered significant attention from the scientific community in recent years. Unlike the collective vibrations in conventional solids, I showed via molecular statics calculations that the highest-frequency modes in the HEO (MgCoCuNiZn)O are localized to a region no larger than a few lattice constants. I am proud to announce this research has been accepted as a manuscript in the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter, and is now available for reading here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-648X/ad2ff1