Tromsø, Norway, June 23-26, 2026
The series of UMD/Magmatomix schools offers a window into the atomistic modeling of natural silicate liquids, fluids, and gases, and their equilibria with minerals. The next event will take place in Tromsø, Norway, immediately after the midnight sun of 2026.
The school intends to provide the basis for understanding the application of first-principles (FP) molecular dynamics (MD) to understand static, dynamic, thermodynamic, and transport properties of multicomponent silicate liquids. We will present different ensembles, statistical analysis of the MD runs, and applications in geophysics. Again, the lecture series will be followed by practical FP and MD tutorials. We introduce the participants to UMD package (Caracas et al., 2021), which is a specialized tool designed for intricate and comprehensive examination of atomistic simulations of fluids. We will exemplify this by obtaining a series of structural, transport and thermodynamic properties of various dry, wet, and carbonated silicate melts.
Using the UMD package the participants will be able to do the following:
* To extract all relevant results from simulations of ab initio molecular dynamics, and construct UMD (=”Universal Molecular Dynamics”) files,
* To apply the individual components of the UMD package to analyze these results,
* To calculate the pair distribution functions, determine the bond length, the size of the coordination sphere, the average coordination numbers,
* To build the connectivity matrix and from there to obtain the chemical speciation, including the population analysis, the polymerization of the melt, and the lifetimes of the different chemical species,
* To determine the mean-square displacements, and from there to extract the diffusion coefficients,
* To compute the self-correlation of the atomic velocities from which to obtain the vibrational spectrum of the fluid and the diffusion coefficients,
* To calculate the self-correlation of the stress tensor from which to estimate the viscosity of the fluid.
Please submit a registration form for the UMD/Magmatomix school following the following link:
The school is made possible by financial contributions from the HIDDEN project, funded by the Norges Forskingsrådet (NFR, project no. 325567), and local help from Radovan Bast, University of Tromsø.