About this blog

This website is set up and maintained by Huanyu Zhou, or Spica.Vir as the GitHub / Google user name.

Its original idea comes from an almost catastrophic rollback from Windows 11 to Windows 10 at the beginning of 2022 (P.S. Microsoft!). The most important lesson that I learnt from it is to keep the technical details, even for those being regarded as ‘out of date’, well-documented for potential future reference, and here comes this website.

The jekyll theme, “Chirpy”, is applied to generate this website.

About me

Research

I am currently an almost finishing PhD student in theoretical chemistry at Imperial College London and am actively looking for research positions such as PostDocs.

Thanks to my industrial partner, BASF SE, my PhD research topic is ab initio modeling of molecular crystals, specifically, to model the thermodynamic properties for phase stability and the solid-liquid interfaces for growth kinetics. I also engaged in projects of 2D materials during these years, so I am also familiar with the modelings for electronic structures and functional materials.

From the technical aspect, I use Python and Linux Shell script most, while I am also familiar with Matlab, FORTRAN, and C. Simulation packages that I am familiar with include density functional theory (DFT) codes CRYSTAL, Quantum Espresso, VASP, and force field codes Lammps and GULP.

My personal GitHub, email, Google Scholar and LinkedIn pages are available at the bottom of the side bar. Other links that might be of use or interest are listed below:

• My ORCID.
• CRYSTALpytools, an open-source python interface to DFT codes, which I co-developed and am maintaining. Available via PyPI and conda-forge.
• HPC job submission, a tool for batch job submission on high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. Developed in bash script for PBS and SLURM batch systems, or personal servers without batch system.
• An Imperial News report on the collaborative project with Chemical Engineering Department and BASF SE, which forms one chapter of my PhD thesis.
• The group webpage, very old though, of the Computational Materials Science Group (CMSG) at Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London, where I happily spent five years.
• 齐卫宏教授的个人主页 (Prof. Weihong Qi’s personal homepage), my undergraduate supervisor at 西北工业大学材料学院 (School of Materials, NWPU). My research project in 2020 is listed there with my name under the “教育教学” section.

Interests

At the another end of the physical scale, the universe is always attractive to me. I own a used 90mm Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope with a mini-Dob mount. It took me quite a few thoughts to fully computerize it, which are documented in a post.

I am an enthusiast in Chinese history and literature, to be specific, Chinese history of 先秦 (pre-Qin dynasty, prior to 221 BC) and 南朝 (the Southern dynasties, 420~589), and the works by 庾信 (Yu Xin), 杜甫 (Du Fu) and 李贺 (Li He). For contemporary literature, I am mostly influenced by 白先勇 (Pai Hsien-yung) and 北岛 (Bei Dao).

Besides, I enjoy reading about London subterranean railways, coin collection and cycling - I had a B’Twin hybrid bike but got stolen. Hopefully I can save enough money for a better one soon.

Epilogue

I hope you find information posted here helpful and interesting.

Some workflows and settings are really rare for routine uses, and personally I am happy with ‘what they are’ as long as they work properly, so I cannot guarantee that all posts are well-maintained under regular inspection. If you find any issues / get a better idea / meet any problem, you are welcome to raise it via email.

To summarize, I prefer to quote two of my favorite poems, though they are not relevant to this page - just feel like to do so, since the contents are completely up to me :-)

春江潮水连海平
海上明月共潮生
潋滟随波千万里
何处春江不月明
—— 张若虚 《春江花月夜》

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years
—— W.B.Yeats, Adam’s Curse