The Direct (Meta) Surface Hopping Paper is Online

David, David, and Alessio’s direct fewest switches surface hopping development paper was accepted to JCTC. Along with details of an efficient implementation of this popular non-adiabatic molecular dynamics approach for low-scaling, single reference excited state methods, a technique in the spirit of “meta-dynamics” that utilizes time-dependent perturbation theory and biased surface hopping trajectories to study . . .

Four New Students Join the Group

The Li group is happy to welcome four new graduate students: Camille Houferak, Joe Kasper, Joseph Radler, and Shichao Sun. Camille comes to us from Barnard College in New York. Both of the Josephs come from schools in Indiana, Kasper from Taylor University and Radler from Purdue University. Shichao worked with us over the summer . . .

Alessio brings in the first publication of 2016: Indium Phosphide Quantum Dots

The collaboration between the Cossairt and Li groups at UW boasts a new publication in The Journal of the American Chemical Society. For the first time the crystallographic structure of a “magic-sized” nanocluster, an important class of intermediates at the interface of small molecules and quantum dots, has been resolved. The obtained structure deviates from . . .

How to describe XAS transition properties

Patrick and Franco have recently published a paper showing how to properly describe the quadrupole-allowed transitions that can be probed with X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS). Different commonly used schemes to describe transition properties were compared and their respective faults and merits were detailed. One scheme is origin dependent and violates the Thomas-Reiche-Kuhn sum rule for . . .

Bo Peng wins the UW Graduate Student Merit Fellowship

The UW Graduate Student Merit Fellowship is awarded in recognition of outstanding academic scholarship based upon accomplishments in research and graded course work. Congratulations to Bo for receiving this award in recognition of his hard work and accomplishments as a graduate student.

Chronus Quantum Initial Beta Release

We are pleased to announce that the Beta version of Chronus Quantum is now available on GitHub! All are encouraged to obtain a copy of the code to aid in the open source, community-driven development of the this software package. Chronus Quantum is an ab initio computational chemistry software package that focuses on explicitly time-dependent . . .

Imaging Excited Orbitals with STM

Working with Prof. Martin Gruebele at the University of Illinois, we showed that it is possible to capture nanometer resolution images of electronically excited PbS quantum dots, using a combination of single molecule absorption and scanning tunneling microscopy (SMA-STM). Usually STM can only image ground state electron density. Transient or steady-state absorption spectroscopy can access . . .

Lestrange and Lingerfelt present their research to the Seattle ARCS Foundation

Earlier today, David Lingerfelt and Patrick Lestrange presented their research to the Seattle chapter of the ARCS Foundation. The Advancing Science in America (ARCS) Foundation awards numerous fellowships and scholarships throughout the country every year. David and Patrick joined other fellows with funding from UW’s Clean Energy Institute to present their research while ARCS members . . .