CRONOS · Time dynamics and ContROl in naNOStructures for magnetic recording and energy applications

The CRONOS project seeks to develop a quantitative, flexible and fully atomistic theory of ultrafast dynamics in real materials. Our effort will create the necessary knowledge for advancing two technological areas crucial for the economic future of Europe and the well being of its citizens: new materials for solar energy harvesting and ultra-high density magnetic data storage. In particular we will construct the necessary theoretical tools for addressing the problems of energy photo-conversion and laser-induced ultrafast magnetization dynamics. Crucially CRONOS will not just look at how an optical excitation perturbs a materials system but also at how such an excitation can be engineered to produce a desired response. Hence both the direct and the inverse problem will be tackled. CRONOS’ theoretical program will be validated by a broad experimental activity on ultra-fast pump-probe spectroscopy and by the presence in the consortium of European companies. Equally important is the fact that the consortium will produce a substantial amount of high-end scientific software, which will then be distributed freely to the academic community.The project will develop a quantitative and materials-specific theory for electron dynamics in nano-structures, which, at the same time, is fully atomistic, efficient, scalable to large systems, and rigorously theoretically formulated. The core of our method is time-dependent density functional theory, TDDFT, which was invented by a member of our consortium and has been developed over the years . Our workplan comprises formal methodological development, algorithm implementation, applications to both solar cells and magnetic recording, and experimental validation. A significant deliverable of this project will also be the wide distribution of computational packages