Today, on April 3, 2017 an article was published with the participation of the SCTMS researchers "Predicting crystal growth via a unified kinetic three-dimensional partition model" in the oldest and influential international journal of science “Nature”.Samara Center for Theoretical Materials Science (SCTMS, Samara, Russia) informs that on April 3, 2017 the research paper “Predicting crystal growth via a unified kinetic three-dimensional partition model” (DOI: 10.1038/nature21684) has been published in the oldest and influential international journal of science “Nature”.
Having a paper published in Nature is very prestigious, and the papers are often highly cited. The author can receive higher recognition across other scientific fields. Thus, an impact factor of Nature was 38,138 (according to Journal Citation Reports) in 2015. In 2009, it was ranked first in the top 100 most influential scientific journals in Biology and Medicine over the last 100 years and was named as journal of the century.
Criteria of selecting papers are quite fierce. Most of the submitted papers are rejected without peer review as research results described in a paper must be sufficiently ground-breaking in that particular field.
It should be emphasized that the mere fact of being published in the Nature journal is a certain ranking indicator in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), which is of great importance for efficiency assessment of universities within the Russian Academic Excellence Project 5-100.
The authoring team of the research paper: Michael W. Anderson, James T. Gebbie-Rayet, Adam R. Hill, Nani Farida, Martin P. Attfield, Pablo Cubillas, Vladislav A. Blatov, Davide M. Proserpio, Duncan Akporiaye, Bjørnar Arstad и Julian D. Gale. The scientists from the UK, Russia, Italy, Norway and Australia took part in the research. Papers of such international research teams are published in the journal Nature most of all, as top-level research requires participation of scientists from different laboratories and countries.
The two authors represent SCTMS: the director Prof. Vladislav Blatov and the leading scientist Prof. Davide M. Proserpio.
The article describes the comprehensive mathematical model, which enables high precision modelling of crystal forms of various chemical substances. A crystal form determines its physical and chemical properties. Thus, the paper presents the approach to understand and predict properties of substances and materials both known and not yet created by nature or man. The paper may be of interest to representatives of the following sciences – Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Biology.
The contribution of every author is stated in the afterword. Samara scientists offered to apply their previously developed mathematical models of the smallest building units of crystals – atomic polyhedra – as initial “bricks” for crystal modelling. They developed the relevant software package that was integrated with crystal growth modelling program of the research team from the University of Manchester (the UK). As a result, Samara scientists revealed what a crystal should be made of, and their British colleagues found out how to grow a crystal. The other co-authors performed experimental verification of the mathematical models.