Physics-based Sustainability

Sustainability involves a few systematic and scientific challenges, including energy crisis, global warming, air pollution and other thorny issues. Most of them essentially lies in over-reliance on fossil fuels and accompanied high carbon emissions. Henceforth, there are two general ways to turn things around:

• To accelerate energy transition, we need to vigorously develop technologies for efficiently utilize renewable energy.
• To facilitate carbon removal, we need new technologies to increase the efficacy of carbon capture, conversion and storage.

In essence, the development of these technologies ultimately depends on computational physics. For example, in the field of renewable energy development, computational physics, such as density functional theory (DFT), is the foundation to calculate the properties of crystals so as to aid the material discovery in the process of designing either photovoltaic or battery materials. Additionally, in the field of carbon capture and conversion, computational molecular dynamics (MD), a specific direction of computational physics, plays as the basis to accelerate the adsorption and conversion of carbon dioxide.