Location: Los Alamos, NM
Cap-Exempt H-1B Position — No lottery required
**What You Will Do** The Materials and Physical Data Group of the X-Computational Physics Division (XCP-5) seeks highly motivated candidates for a postdoctoral research position focused on the development of kinetic theory frameworks and their application to warm dense matter, a regime at the intersection of solids, liquids, gases, and plasmas. The goal of this work is to connect microscopic physics to macroscopic behavior in regimes where strong Coulomb interactions, thermal excitations, structural disorder, and quantum effects coexist, rendering standard descriptions based on limiting states inadequate. The successful candidate will contribute to the development and application of kinetic theory approaches specifically designed for these intermediate conditions. Research activities will involve a range of theoretical and computational methods, including techniques from statistical mechanics and classical and quantum many-body physics, as well as classical and quantum atomistic simulations. The selected candidate will be encouraged to translate fundamental results into practical constitutive models suitable for use in large-scale simulation codes and to relate theoretical and computational findings to current experimental results. The project scope is flexible and may be tailored to combine several aspects of theory, modeling, and simulation, depending on the candidate's background, strengths, and research interests. XCP-5 is an interdisciplinary group which develops, implements, and validates constitutive models (material strength, damage and failure, etc.), equations of state (EOS), and physical data libraries including opacities and nuclear cross-sections for use in large-scale simulation codes; additionally, some group members collaborate in the design and analysis of small-scale and integral validation experiments for material models and physical data. XCP-5 offers an exciting, flexible, scientifically challenging work environment with many opportunities to co