Jeffrey B. Neaton

LBNL Staff Scientist

jbneaton@lbl.gov
phone: 510-486-4527


Education
B.S. Physics, University of Minnesota
Ph.D Physics, Cornell University
Postdoctoral Fellow Rutgers University, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

General Research Interests
I seek to develop theories of nanoscale materials and phenomena with the aim to guide and explain experiments. A broad array of "first-principles" simulation tools is drawn upon for this work, most of which are based on density functional theory (DFT). First-principles methods are atomic-scale computational approaches with the ability to predict measurable properties of materials with good accuracy from scratch, i.e., through solution of the quantum mechanics of a system of interacting electrons in a field of nuclei. In recent years these methods have emerged as a reliable nanoscopic probe of materials properties. My group works with a variety of techniques (both first principles and more approximate), including static DFT-based methods for ground-state and associated linear-response properties, tight-binding, GW and Bethe-Salpeter methods for excited-state properties, and steady-state scattering-state approaches to electron transport at finite bias. With this flexible toolset, we explore and understand a wide variety of structural, electronic, vibrational, and transport properties of nanostructures.