Sarah Jenkins

Sarah Jenkins

Sarah is from The University of York, England. During her time there she studied physics, specialising in computational magnetism. This led to her masters thesis being entitled “The atomistic origin of exchange bias in Iridium Manganese/Cobalt Iron bilayers”. This is a project she greatly enjoyed and therefore will be continuing at York for a Ph.D as part of the same research group with the aim of atomically modelling a magnetic read head. However, this is an extremely large scale simulation as this will consist modelling the interactions between of millions of atoms. This led Sarah to apply for the summer of HPC programme, as learning high performance computing techniques will greatly improve the computing time for these simulations. She therefore hopes to be able to use all the techniques she acquires throughout this project as part of her PhD.

During this summer she will be working at Forschungszentrum, Jülich with Dr. Stefan Krieg. The project will focus on the optimisation of a quantum chromodynamics software package. Quantum chromodynamics is the study the strong interaction, this is a fundamental force describing the interactions between quarks and gluons which make up hadrons such as the proton the neutron and the pion. This can be used to study the properties of matter now and just a couple of seconds after the big bang.

She has also greatly enjoyed meeting a lot of new people from all around Europe and hopes to learn more about other cultures throughout the rest of the programme.