Dr. Xuan Luo currently works at the University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign. Dr. Luo received her B.S and M.S. in Condensed Matter Physics from Jilin University, and her Ph.D. in Composite Materials from Harbin Institute of Technology in 1997. She did her postdoc research work at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, and was a Guest Scientist at Rossendorf Research Center in Dresden, Germany in 1999. She also visited Max Plank Institute of Metal Research in Stuttgart, Germany, and Max Plank Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle, Germany. At present, she is a postdoc researcher in the National Renewable Energy Lab.

Dr. Luo specializes in Molecular Dynamics simulation of large-scale materials, especially on surfaces and interfaces. She coded a classical molecular dynamics program and fitted the interatomic potentials for systems such as C/N, SiC, Al/SiC, Ag/Ni, and Cu/Ni. During her stay in Germany, she studied C-N compound materials. For her Ph.D. degree, she studied the SiC/Al interface structures and the orientation relationship between the Al matrix and SiC whisker by molecular dynamics simulations in conjunction with TEM analysis. For her postdoc study at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, she developed a new type of Tight-Binding Molecular Dynamics (TBMD) method. This makes it possible to simulate large-scale complicated alloys and composite systems using TBMD. She also developed a Tight-Binding (TB) package using the Rotation Matrix, rather than the traditional Slater-Koster formalism. At present, she is using first-principles methods to study the growth of Si-based atomic size devices. She is also studying the effects of impurities, defects, and their complexes on semiconductor doping limits and other related topics.

Xuan Luo can be reached at:

e-mail: xluo3@uiuc.edu.