Background

Amit Samanta joined the Equation of State and Materials Theory group at LLNL on November of 2013. His graduate thesis with Professor Ju Li was entitled "Atomistic study of the deformation mechanisms during nanoindentation". Dr. Samanta was a post-doc in the Applied and Computational Mathematics Program at Princeton University from 2009-2013 working with Professor Weinan E on multi-scale simulation techniques. He worked on methods to study rare transition events, free energy sampling at finite temperature and pressure conditions, and non-collinear orbital free density functional theory.

Research Interests

• Computational method development
  • Free energy surface sampling methods
  • Machine learned interatomic potentials
  • Methods to study rare transition events
• Deformation behavior of metals
• Grain boundary phase transitions in metals
• Mechanisms of phase transitions
• Mechanisms of sintering of nanoparticles
• Stability of defects in opto-electronic materials and high temperature ceramics

Ph.D., Materials Science and Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2009

M.Sc., Materials Science and Engineering, Ohio State University, Columbus, 2007

B.S., Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India, 2003

1. Qiang Zhu, Amit Samanta, Bingxi Li, Robert E. Rudd, and Timofey Frolov, “Predicting phase behavior of grain boundaries with evolutionary search and machine learning”, Nature Communications 9, 467 (2018).
2. Joel B. Varley, Amit Samanta, and Vincenzo Lordi, “Descriptor-Based Approach for the Prediction of Cation Vacancy Formation Energies and Transition Levels”, J. Chem. Phys. Lett. 8, 5059 (2017).
3. L.A. Zepeda-Ruiz, B. Sadigh, A.A. Chernov, T. Haxhimali, A. Samanta, T. Oppelstrup, S. Hamel, L.X. Benedict, and J.L. Belof, “Extraction of effective solid-liquid interfacial free energies for full 3D solid crystallites from equilibrium MD simulations”, J. Chem. Phys. 147, 194704 (2017).
4. Tuan Anh Pham, Kyoung E. Kweon, Amit Samanta, Vincenzo Lordi, and John E. Pask, “Solvation and Dynamics of Sodium and Potassium in Ethylene Carbonate from ab initio Molecular Dynamics Simulations”, J. Phys. Chem. C 121, 21913 (2017).
5. Qian Yu, Josh Kacher, Christoph Gammer, Rachel Traylor, Amit Samanta, Zhenzhong Yang, and Andrew M. Minor, “In situ TEM observation of FCC Ti formation at elevated temperatures”, Scripta Materialia 140, 9 (2017).

Physical and Life Science Directorate award for excellence in publication, 2014