Student researcher(s) for Topological Insulator project.

I am looking for a student (or students) capable of serious independent research to join a research project calculating the electron states of topological insulators on a pyrochlore lattice.

 I realize that you would probably do not know what a topological insulator is or a pyrochlore lattice (and that is fine). The ability to visualize and understand 3D structures (of atoms) would be a big plus. Also a willingness and ability to tackle difficult projects, and a high level of aptitude and initiative in physics would be valuable. We are stuck on something, not sure what, in a calculation for the pyrochlore crystal Nd2Ir2O7, and need someone to help sort that out. (After that there will be other related things to do.)

The calculations we do use a program called FPLO.  The inner guts of the program are way too complex to sort out. The key thing a student researcher would do is prepare the input (which requires understanding the structure, via literature search, and some other things I may not know about), running the program (that's all set up for you already), hoping it converges (and fixing anything that interferes with that), and then looking at the output, which we can work together to understand. You would be working with me, another student who has some experience running the code, and Arthur P. Ramirez, a well-known physicist from Bell Labs who has done some work on topological insulators (and is now dean of engineering at UCSC). Please email me if you are interested.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_GIlXrjJVn4LS05ZHItbjNKMmM/edit?usp=sharing