Dr. Philipsen joins SCM for BAND development

SCM is happy to announce a further extension of its scientific staff. Dr. Pier Philipsen has signed up with SCM for a full-time position starting March 1, 2006. His primary tasks will revolve around the BAND code for periodic DFT calculations. In addition to his own developments, Dr. Philipsen will cooperate with external BAND developers at various universities and also take care of support for BAND users.

A first project will be the introduction of a graphical user interface for BAND, which is planned for the ADF2006 release later this year. This BAND-GUI will simplify the preparation of BAND input files and enable visualization of results of BAND calculations, with modules that are very similar to the current ADF-GUI modules.

A number of other developments in BAND are ongoing. When these projects get closer to a date for general release, SCM will reveal further information. In general, we aim to strengthen the ties between ADF and BAND, and to extend the current strengths of the ADF code to periodic structures.