Sam M. Vinko

As a Tutorial Fellow in Physics at Trinity I teach a range of topics across the undergraduate curriculum. My current focus is on the first-year Mathematics courses (CP3 and CP4 papers), second-year Optics, and third year Atomic and Laser Physics. In the Physics Department I lecture on density functional theory applied to dense plasmas as part of a joint graduate course for first-year DPhil students from Oxford, Imperial College, and the University of Warwick. My research group comprises around ten members, including postdoctoral researchers, DPhil students and final-year MPhys students.

I’m interested in understanding the behaviour of quantum systems in extreme conditions of temperature, density and pressure. Such conditions are ubiquitous in large astrophysical objects such as (exo)planets and stars, but are also of critical importance to research in inertial confinement fusion. To create and study these systems in the laboratory my research group uses some of the largest light sources on the planet, including the LCLS x-ray free-electron laser in California, and the European XFEL in Germany. The experimental research we do is deeply integrated with theoretical and computational endeavours, both in terms of quantum modelling via techniques such as density functional theory, and atomic physics modelling via collisional-radiative atomic kinetics. We also extensively use machine learning to support our research, ranging from prediction acceleration via various novel approaches in deep learning, to the application of Bayesian inference and other advanced statistical techniques to the robust interpretation of noisy, incomplete experimental data.

Ren et al.,  Non-thermal evolution of dense plasmas driven by intense x-ray fields. Commun. Phys. 6, 99 (2023).

Kasim, Lehtola, Vinko, DQC: A Python program package for differentiable quantum chemistry. J. Chem. Phys. 156, 19 (2022).

Kasim et al., Building high accuracy emulators for scientific simulations with deep neural architecture search. Mach. Learn.: Sci. Technol. 3, 015013 (2022).

Kasim & Vinko, Learning the exchange-correlation functional from nature with fully differentiable density functional theory. Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 126403 (2021).

Vinko et al., Time-resolved XUV opacity measurements of warm dense aluminum. Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 225002 (2020).

Vinko et al., Creation and diagnosis of a solid-density plasma with an X-ray free-electron laser. Nature 482 (7383), 59 (2012).