Unveiling the behaviour of hydrogen molecules

Dr William Yim had the opportunity to collaborate with Toshiaki Iitaka from Riken Advanced Science Institute and Prof John Tse from Canada’s University of Saskatchewan last year.

The team of researchers discovered the physical basis to explain the newly discovered vibration behavior of molecular hydrogen, including ‘silane’ - hydrogen bound to silicon, under high pressure.

The two-month project resulted in a paper, ‘Pressure-induced intermolecular interactions in crystalline silane-hydrogen’, that was published in Physical Review Letters 105.

The cross-disciplinary team was like a dream team, made possible by the mutual introductions given by Prof John Tse and Dr Wu Ping, IHPC’s Director of Material Science and Engineering Department.

“Prof. John Tse’s expertise is on experimental and computational research on materials science and he is famous in high pressure research field” said William. “Dr. Toshiaski Iitaka is a permanent staff member at Riken working on solid state research and program development for linear scaling computational method.”