What this is
THE GRID — public, perpetually unfinished notes on condensed-matter physics, electronic structure, and the methods I use day to day. Notes are interlinked, half-grown, and occasionally wrong. If you spot a mistake, tell me.
I’m Axel, a computational materials scientist in the Mendoza-Cortés Group at Michigan State University. This is where I keep the formal write-ups that don’t belong on the blog: derivations, method notes, and the scaffolding behind my research.
How to use this site
Two ways in, by topic or by depth:
- By topic — the four areas below, the file explorer (left), the backlinks at the
bottom of each note, or the graph view. Search is
Ctrl/Cmd+K. - By depth — every note is tagged with a complexity level,
level/0-foundationsthroughlevel/3-frontier. The tag pages (e.g.level/2-advanced) collect everything at a given depth across all areas. For the whole site laid out as a single ladder, see The Atlas.
The grading convention and frontmatter schema live in conventions.
Areas
- Physics — magnetism & spin-wave theory, lattice dynamics, electronic structure
- Methods — practical DFT and beyond: +U, hybrids, DC-DFT, phonon workflows, MLIPs
- Mathematics — the backbone: crystal symmetry, BdG/para-Hermitian algebra, Green’s functions
- Materials & systems — the specific systems I compute: SnSe₂/WSe₂, CrI₃/CrSBr, flat-band models
THE GRID is built with Quartz and hosted on GitHub Pages, separate from the main site so figures and notes don’t bump the page-size limits.