Peter Spackman
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crystalexplorer.net
Peter Spackman
@crystalexplorer.net
Computers, crystals and chemistry. Research Fellow in the Computational Materials and Minerals Group at Curtin University. @peterspackman@mastodon.social
Reposted by Peter Spackman
📢 One less molecular mystery - the crystal structure of diacetylene is solved, published in @iucrj.iucr.org today! Fantastic work by Larissa, and also I think will be the first structure deposit in @ccdc.cam.ac.uk from wombat! Read the OA paper here journals.iucr.org/m/issues/202...
December 22, 2025 at 11:05 PM
Great to see the work in Vitaly’s group on descriptors for comparing crystal structures get recognised, and in an interesting article to boot!
Duplicates of crystal structures are flooding databases, implicating repositories hosting organic, inorganic, and computer-generated crystals. The issue raises questions about curation practices at databases and claims around novelty. cen.acs.org/research-int... #chemsky 🧪
The duplicates that haunt crystallography databases
Researchers call for retraction of two recent <i>Nature</i> studies about AI-generated crystals
cen.acs.org
December 18, 2025 at 12:27 PM
Reposted by Peter Spackman
Super excited to get this preprint online with @graemeday.bsky.social !

With SAUCE, we significantly improve on the efficiency of random structure searching for crystals containing multiple symmetry-independent molecules!

chemrxiv.org/engage/chemr...
#compchem #csp
December 16, 2025 at 7:34 PM
Still a few more weeks to apply for a sunny postdoc opportunity with a pretty cool guy (me) in a really warm place (Perth) and predict the organic crystals on a pretty cold place (Titan), in space. staff.curtin.edu.au/job-vacancie...
Job vacancies, employment opportunities, academic and professional positions - Careers at Curtin | Curtin University, Perth Australia
Our mission is to transform lives and communities through education and research. Curtin employees form a unique and diverse community committed to innovative research and student learning. Find out a...
staff.curtin.edu.au
December 16, 2025 at 10:51 AM
Excited to share our new pre-print, with features sneakily already available in CrystalExplorer + OCC: Elastic Tensors from Pairwise Energy Frameworks in Molecular Crystals doi.org/10.26434/che...
Elastic Tensors from Pairwise Energy Frameworks in Molecular Crystals
Mechanical properties of molecular crystals are fundamentally important to their in- dustrial utility as pharmaceuticals or agrochemicals, energetic materials and more. Yet, complete measurements of e...
doi.org
December 10, 2025 at 8:04 AM
Reposted by Peter Spackman
New paper out, High-pressure crystallisation of Isobutyronitrile pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/..., nice results from the UWA and Synchrotron team that show this small molecule crystallises into the same structure as at low temperatures. There's some lovely calculations that explain why this may be.
High-Pressure Crystallization and Compression of Isobutyronitrile
The structural response of a high-pressure phase of isobutyronitrile up to 6.12 GPa was studied by using high-pressure single-crystal X-ray diffraction, periodic density functional theory (DFT), and C...
pubs.acs.org
December 9, 2025 at 11:41 PM
Still another month or so to apply to work with me: predicting the crystals and their properties on Titan!
December 3, 2025 at 11:55 AM
Great news! Can vouch that it’s a very impressive and stable (and a small model at only about 14MB).
November 28, 2025 at 8:44 AM
Reposted by Peter Spackman
📢 PET-MAD is here! 📢 It has been for a while for those who read the #arXiv, but now you get it preciously 💸 typeset by @natcomms.nature.com Take home: unconstrained architecture + good train set choices give you fast, accurate and stable universal MLIP that just works™️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...
PET-MAD as a lightweight universal interatomic potential for advanced materials modeling - Nature Communications
PET-MAD is a fast and lightweight universal machine-learning potential, trained on a small but diverse dataset, that delivers near-quantum accuracy in atomistic simulations for both organic and inorga...
www.nature.com
November 28, 2025 at 8:36 AM
The latest in my wasm experiments is getting an MLIP running, so you can watch some molecules (or crystals, if you have more patience) wiggle, all running locally in your web browser on your phone, computer, tablet, wherever! peterspackman.github.io/mlip.cpp/
mlip.js - ML Interatomic Potentials in the Browser
peterspackman.github.io
November 28, 2025 at 5:09 AM
Reposted by Peter Spackman
I've got a post-doctoral research position available at Curtin University (Western Australia) starting 2026.
The project involves computational prediction of crystal structures, their growth, and their properties for organic minerals on Titan (moon of Saturn).

staff.curtin.edu.au/job-vacancie...
Job vacancies, employment opportunities, academic and professional positions - Careers at Curtin | Curtin University, Perth Australia
Our mission is to transform lives and communities through education and research. Curtin employees form a unique and diverse community committed to innovative research and student learning. Find out a...
staff.curtin.edu.au
November 13, 2025 at 11:47 PM
I've got a post-doctoral research position available at Curtin University (Western Australia) starting 2026.
The project involves computational prediction of crystal structures, their growth, and their properties for organic minerals on Titan (moon of Saturn).

staff.curtin.edu.au/job-vacancie...
Job vacancies, employment opportunities, academic and professional positions - Careers at Curtin | Curtin University, Perth Australia
Our mission is to transform lives and communities through education and research. Curtin employees form a unique and diverse community committed to innovative research and student learning. Find out a...
staff.curtin.edu.au
November 13, 2025 at 11:47 PM
Reposted by Peter Spackman
The authors of a Comment article discuss how scientists, research institutions, funders, libraries and publishers must all improve software practices. They outline recommendations for an approach to handle software better. #Academicsky 🧪
Stop treating code like an afterthought: record, share and value it
Scientists, research institutions, funders, libraries and publishers must all improve software practices.
go.nature.com
October 24, 2025 at 1:46 AM
I finally wrote some basic documentation for OCC, including some nice (I think) interactive examples in the web browser using the virtual file system in WASM. Proof of concept for tutorials/teaching in the future I hope! getocc.xyz
OCC
Open Computational Chemistry - Quantum chemistry calculations in your browser
getocc.xyz
October 20, 2025 at 8:17 AM
Reposted by Peter Spackman
Newton-X/CP2K interface: surface hopping with plane wave TDDFT is now possible. #compchem

A Density Functional Theory and Semiempirical Framework for Trajectory Surface Hopping on Extended Systems | Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....
A Density Functional Theory and Semiempirical Framework for Trajectory Surface Hopping on Extended Systems
Nonadiabatic molecular dynamics simulations provide a theoretical understanding of various excited-state processes in photochemistry, offering access to band widths, radiative or nonradiative relaxation and corresponding lifetimes, excited-state energies, and charge transfer. The range of method developments within the framework of time-dependent density functional theory is exceedingly large for molecular quantum chemistry. Still, it shrinks significantly when aiming to treat periodic boundary conditions. To address this gap and complement existing software packages for solid-state nonadiabatic molecular dynamics, we present an interface between the CP2K electronic structure and the NEWTON-X surface hopping codes. The interface features the generation of initial conditions, as well as adiabatic and nonadiabatic molecular dynamics, based on phenomenological or numerical time-derivative couplings. Setups are validated on gas-phase pyrazine, with electronic absorption spectra and excited-state populations for transitions between the lowest singlet states being in agreement with established molecular quantum chemistry methods. Extending the system size to crystalline pyrazine, limitations of approximate couplings are discussed, and the efficiency and applicability of the interface are demonstrated by computing broad spectra over several eV and 100 fs trajectories, considering couplings between all 80th lowest excited states, at low computational cost with a mixed semiempirical density functional theory setup.
pubs.acs.org
October 20, 2025 at 7:58 AM
Reposted by Peter Spackman
Reposted by Peter Spackman
Looks like @ox.ac.uk forbids their researchers to do any kind of literature search, though it seems that thankfully they can still submit to the arxiv arxiv.org/abs/2510.00027 🤷
Learning Inter-Atomic Potentials without Explicit Equivariance
Accurate and scalable machine-learned inter-atomic potentials (MLIPs) are essential for molecular simulations ranging from drug discovery to new material design. Current state-of-the-art models enforc...
arxiv.org
October 5, 2025 at 6:19 PM
Have you ever wanted to run LAMMPS in the browser (on one core)? No? Well now you can anyway: www.prs.wiki/utilities/la...
LAMMPS Interface | Peter R. Spackman
Run LAMMPS molecular dynamics simulations in your browser
www.prs.wiki
August 27, 2025 at 3:35 AM
Reposted by Peter Spackman
🧪🤖 Our first paper on autoplex is published! We describe an automated #compchem framework for building MLIP training datasets, and show a range of application examples. A pleasure to collaborate on this with @molecularxtal.bsky.social & team. Thank you everyone! doi.org/10.1038/s414...
An automated framework for exploring and learning potential-energy surfaces - Nature Communications
Machine learning is revolutionising materials modelling but requires high-quality training data. Here, the authors introduce autoplex, an open framework automating exploration and fitting of potential...
doi.org
August 21, 2025 at 11:00 AM
Today I added geometry optimisation, visualisation of the optimisation trajectories and animation of the vibrational modes (Hessian from finite differences) - hopefully that's enough (for now)!
A second follow-up: added an option visualize MO density isosurfaces! Behind the scenes it's actually generating .cube files - all in the browser.
August 21, 2025 at 3:54 AM
Reposted by Peter Spackman
Congrats to @benshi.bsky.social on this new work now out in Nature Chemistry! Beyond-DFT results without breaking the bank. 💪

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
An accurate and efficient framework for modelling the surface chemistry of ionic materials - Nature Chemistry
Simulating molecular adsorption on surfaces presents considerable challenges, as computational methods typically suffer from either insufficient accuracy or prohibitive computational costs. Now, with ...
www.nature.com
August 14, 2025 at 7:35 PM
Reposted by Peter Spackman
New PostDoc opportunity in #CompChem at
@uclchemistry.bsky.social

Join our exciting research to develop novel wavefunction theory for open-shell ground and excited states in molecules. Find out more about our group at www.hughburton.com

Please share widely!

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DOE518/r...
Research Fellow in Theoretical Quantum Chemistry at UCL
Apply for the Research Fellow in Theoretical Quantum Chemistry role on jobs.ac.uk, the top job board for academic positions in higher education. View details and apply now.
www.jobs.ac.uk
August 5, 2025 at 9:13 AM
A second follow-up: added an option visualize MO density isosurfaces! Behind the scenes it's actually generating .cube files - all in the browser.
July 31, 2025 at 4:54 AM
Following up to this, I built a full basic working example for molecular DFT calculations running totally in the browser: www.prs.wiki/utilities/wa... - it's pretty neat to be able to run an SCF on your phone, and web assembly is really surprisingly fast! Visualising orbitals next!
July 29, 2025 at 12:54 AM