Michele Simoncelli wins the SPS Award in Computational Physics

This was published on October 5, 2023

The award recognizes the contributions “to a modern theory of thermal transport in solids” from his PhD research supervised by Nicola Marzari. 

Former MARVEL member Michele Simoncelli has been recently awarded by the Swiss Physical Society (SPS) for the research work he started during his PhD with Nicola Marzari’s group at EPFL and now continuing at University of Cambridge.

The Computational Physics award is given annually by the SPS and is sponsored by COMSOL Multiphysics GmbH, a software company that develops solutions for physics simulation. The award recognizes Michele’s contributions “to a modern theory of thermal transport in solids”.

Simoncelli’s PhD research—supervised by Nicola Marzari—contributed to the fundamental understanding of heat transport in solids, developing a theoretical and computational framework that rationalizes properties ranging from the atomistic to the macroscopic scale. At the atomistic level, it unified the existing fundamentally different microscopic theories of heat conduction in crystals and glasses, showing that the quantum wave-particle duality emerges in thermal transport and solving the long-standing problem of accurately predicting the thermal properties of crystals such as thermoelectrics with ultralow or glass-like thermal conductivity.

Michele Simoncelli (on the right) receives the award from Sven Friedel, managing director of COMSOL Multiphysics, Zurich. Credit: Swiss Physical Society.

At the macroscopic level, it discusses a set of “viscous heat equations” that generalise 200-years-old Fourier’s law, explaining why in graphitic devices heat propagation can become fluid-like, rather than diffusive.

Simoncelli has been working as a research fellow at University of Cambridge since 2021. His most recent contributions rationalized the emergence of viscous heat backflow in extreme thermal conductors, hybridization of crystal- and glass-like transport and anomalous conductivity trends emerging in minerals.

Simoncelli received the award on the 5th September 2023 in Basel.

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