Mattia Iannetti

We all experience the rising need of a reliable, efficient, cheap and green energy source which can satisfy all the standards of the modern society. Nuclear energy can easily achieve these goals, provided that some improvements are applied. You may have listened that the main problem of using this kind of energy is to secure the waste of nuclear reactions in a short time. So, what fuel do we choice and how? PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) summer of HPC (High Performance Computing), with the project “Heat transport in novel nuclear fuels“, proposes a new type of material involving the so-called Th-cycle, a specific decay chain of thorium, that has the advantage, over the currently used fuels (MOX, UO₂, …), of a securing-time of a decade at maximum! This project has the scope of studying the thermal behavior of such elements to ensure safety feature via quantum mechanical calculations. In order to perform such a large amount of calculations the use of a large HPC facility, such as czech national HPC infrastructure, is needed. But now let me introduce myself.

Hi everyone, I’m Mattia and I’m from Italy. I’m a condensed matter physics (CMP) student at the university of L’Aquila. My career has started in 2018 when I become a physics student. Since I was a child my curiosity in general, and on the physic world in particular, lead me to enter more and more in this field. At the university I finally choose my main field of interest in CMP with my bachelor thesis on “Dynamical properties of disordered graphene“. With this project I have the possibility to increase my knowledge and meet new people that share my interests.

When I first heard about PRACE summer of HPC I was so exited because of the opportunity to work on high level international projects with other students coming from other countries. Moreover, the energetic problem, is one of the most urgent nowadays and to be part of “Heat transport in novel nuclear fuels” , supervised by Domink Legut, IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center at VSB – Technical University of Ostrava organization, is really exciting. Besides I’m really interested both in the theoretical background that this project will teach me and on the overture on the research field considering the rising need of a computational approach to physical problems. I can’t wait to begin this project!