Professor Michael Allen

Mike Allen is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Warwick, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Physics at Bristol University. His research interests lie in computer simulations of condensed matter at the molecular level, with most activity focused on liquids and liquid crystals.

In 2015 he was awarded the Lennard-Jones Prize and Lectureship by the Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Professor Allen founded, along with Dominic Tildesley and Julian Clarke, the CCP5 Summer School, "Methods in Molecular Simulation", which has provided postgraduate training every year since its inception in 1994. He has returned to the School in recent years to give lectures and run workshops.

He is the co-author, with Dominic Tildesley, of the book "Computer Simulation of Liquids" (2nd edition, Oxford University Press, 2017).

Talk abstract: Computer simulation: its impact on our understanding of liquids and complex fluids

This talk will revisit some classic papers from the early days, showing how computer simulation complemented both theory and experiment, and thereby improved our understanding of the liquid state. Pioneers in the field overcame significant challenges to achieve some dramatic early successes, from very simple models of atomic interactions. In due course, more realistic models could be tackled. Molecular simulations of water, in particular, were directly compared with a range of experimental studies, clarifying our understanding of this essential liquid, and underpinning the study of a huge range of chemical and biological systems. Simulation has also made an impact on our understanding of liquid crystals, polymers, colloids, and other complex fluids. The talk will conclude that, although computer simulations are now widely accessible, through well-developed packages which run on fast and cheap computers, we can still learn some lessons from the work of these early researchers.

Read Professor Mike Allen's synopsis: 
Computer simulation, its impact on our understanding of liquids and complex fluids