Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA

Sandia National Laboratories is the nation’s premier science and
engineering lab for national security and technology innovation. We focus
on cutting-edge technology ranging from homeland defense, global security,
biotechnology, and environmental preservation, to energy and combustion
research, computer security, and nuclear defense. Learn more at our
website:  www.sandia.gov

Department Description

The Combustion Chemistry program, under the principal sponsorship of
the Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy Sciences, seeks to
reveal the key chemical processes that underlie the complex mechanisms
of combustion.  The program emphasizes determination of the rates and
mechanisms of chemical reactions, characterization of molecular
structure and energetics, and measurement and modeling of idealized
combustion devices.  Researchers in the program employ laser-based
pump/probe techniques to interrogate chemical reactivity and
structure, ion-imaging to simultaneously measure velocity and
internal-state distributions of reaction products, and experiments in
the femtosecond-domain to directly probe energy conversion within a
molecule.  In other work, molecular photolysis is coupled with
absorption/fluorescence detection methods to determine the thermal
rate coefficients and product distributions for reactions that
constitute the individual steps in the combustion chain process.
Current computational efforts include ab initio calculations of
molecular structure and energetics and computer modeling of the
complete kinetics of combustion processes in both laminar and
turbulent environments.

Job Description

We expect to have from one to four post-doctoral positions available
to conduct research in the theory and modeling of combustion chemistry
with Drs. James Miller and/or Ahren Jasper. Depending on interests and
experience, a candidate could work in any one of 3 research areas:

1.  The theoretical prediction of rate coefficients of elementary
reactions from first principles using electronic-structure,
(variational) transition-state-theory, and master-equation methods.
Applications will be to reactions involved in the low-temperature
oxidation of bio-derived fuels and to reactions involved in the
formation of cyclic and polycyclic aromatic compounds in flames of
aliphatic fuels.

2.  The study of collisional energy transfer in highly vibrationally
excited molecules using classical trajectory and/or quantum scattering
methods.

3.  Combustion modeling

Required / Desired Criteria

For positions 1 and 2, familiarity with quantum chemistry software
(Gaussian, MOLPRO, etc.) and interest in chemical kinetics and
combustion chemistry are essential, as are outstanding computer skills
and some experience with Fortran programming. For position 2, an
interest in high-performance computing is also desired, since this
project will involve significant use of the DOE's large-scale
supercomputers.

For position 3, experience with CHEMKIN, outstanding computer skills,
and experience with Fortran programming are required. Also highly
desirable are knowledge of chemical kinetics mechanism reduction and
approximation techniques such as ILDM, CSP, and RCCE and experience
with quantum chemistry software.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Sandia National Laboratories is an Equal Opportunity Employer M/F/D/V.

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