The COMP Graduate Student and Post Doc Image Competition Winner for New Orleans (Spring 2013)

About the cover image. The image is a representation of the atomic structure of the β-NaLaF4 super cell floating on a section of its diffuse single crystal diffraction honeycomb pattern. The structure view is oriented around a central La column (green) connected to three strictly alternating Na – La (yellow – red) and three strictly alternating Na – void (orange – white) through a fluorine framework (turquoise) allowing variations of the occupation sequence in next neighbor columns. Rare earth doped members of this family of compounds show light up-conversion capability used for applications in LED display devices and labels for immunoassays.. The image was created using ParaView for the diffuse X-Ray diffraction pattern background and CrystalMaker for the β-NaLaF4 super cell; ZODS (Zürich Oak Ridge Disorder Simulation) is used for local structure analysis.

About the cover image artist, Tara Michels-Clark. Tara received her BS in Mathematics and a minor in Physics from King College and a MS in Mathematics from East Tennessee State University. She taught undergraduate Mathematics for five years at Nashville State Community College and Middle Tennessee State University until 2009, before pursuing a PhD in Theoretical Physical Chemistry with a minor in computational sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is jointly mentored by Robert Harrison (UTK), Christina Hoffmann (Spallation Neutron Source, ORNL) and collaborating with the University of Zürich, University of Bern and ETH Zürich. Tara’s PhD research focuses on “Employing high performance computing for structure elucidation of locally disturbed crystalline materials using Monte Carlo crystal modeling and evolutionary algorithms” and is funded by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, supported by the Division of Scientific User Facilities, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, US Department of Energy, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with UT Battelle, LLC. and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Connect with Tara on LinkedIn (direct link to her public LinkedIn page).