First XLIC Training School will take place in Zaragoza, at the premises of Z-CAM (http://www.z-cam.es/). It will be organized in two modules of one week each. Attendees can participate in one or both of them.

• Module 1. March 9-13, 2015
  Molecular Excited States (Download tentative program)
• Module 2. March 16-20, 2015
  New Computational Methods for Attosecond Molecular Processes (Download tentative program)

TRAINING PROGRAM: Contents of the courses and list of trainers can be checked, for each module, in the documents linked above. Nevertheless, interested participants are encouraged to check for updates on each module webpage .

ACCOMMODATION: Local organizers have arranged accommodation  for all registered participants in the same hotels (Apartamentos Los Sitios and Apartamentos Los Girasoles), where apartments (multiple occupancy with individual rooms) with a kitchen area are offered during the duration of the schools (arriving on Sunday and leaving on Friday). Participats attending both modules can also stay in the apartment during the weekend.
If you are interested in this option, please, contact local organisers as soon as possible to confirm booking details. Payment should be done directly by each participant before leaving.

MEALS: Lunches during training days will be covered for all participants. Dinner and breakfast will not be included.

FEES: There are no registration fees.

FINANCIAL SUPPORT: XLIC Action will offer grants to partially cover the participation of young researchers involved in the Action. Each participant will receive a notification with information on the amount granted. of grants and amount will depend on the number of requests for funding.

REGISTRATION is now closed. Participants can check the status of their application at CECAM website (separately for each module), using their CECAM account.

REIMBURSEMENT: Each participant should pay his/her own expenses to the Hotel before leaving. Those participants selected for funding will receive a letter indicating the fixed amount granted. After the event, reimbursement will be done subject to the submission of a payment request form and the effective attendance to the school. No receipts will be asked for.

LOCATION: The activities will take place at the R+D Building (BIFI) in the campus of the University of Zaragoza in the north of the city (ZCAM CONFERENCE BUILDING: Campus Río Ebro – Edificio I+D; C/Mariano Esquillor s/n. 50018 Zaragoza)

HOW TO REACH ZARAGOZA: You can arrive in Zaragoza by plane, train, bus and car. If you come from abroad and you land at either Madrid or Barcelona airports, then the train or the bus are usually the best options for the last part of the trip up to Zaragoza.

• By plane: The airport is situated 9 km from the city. At present, there are regular flights to Frankfurt (weekdays), Rome, London, Milan and Lisbon and domestic flights to Madrid and Barcelona. Connections from the airport to the city are by bus and taxi. You can make a flight search in the web sites of the companies that operate with the Zaragoza airport: Iberia, Air Europa, and Ryanair (low cost company).
• By train: Zaragoza has a new railway station (Estación de Delicias), with a high‐speed connection to Madrid and Barcelona (AVE train). The railway station is at the same place as bus and taxi stops, and car rental services. Zaragoza is also connected by train to other major Spanish cities such as Valencia, Granada, Sevilla and Málaga. Timetable information can be obtained at the Spanish Railway Company web site: Renfe.
• By bus: Zaragoza is connected by bus to the main Spanish cities. You can search the routes and timetables in the web site of the Spanish bus company ALSA.
• By car: Zaragoza has an excellent communication network, and is linked to the North of Spain: through a motor way to Bilbao (A‐68) and Barcelona (A‐2), and the Aragón highway connecting to Madrid (N‐II).

The CECAM School on: “Theoretical Spectroscopy Lectures: theory and codes” reaches the 6th edition and takes place from 18th to 22th of May, 2015 at the CECAM-HQ-EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Electronic excitations are probed by experimental techniques such as optical absorption, EELS and photo-emission (direct or inverse). From the theory point of view, excitations and excited state properties are out of the reach of density-functional theory (DFT), which is a ground-state theory. In the last twenty years other ab-initio theories and frameworks, which are able to describe electronic excitations and spectroscopy, have become more and more used: time-dependent density-functional theory (TDDFT) and many-body perturbation theory (MBPT) or Green’s function theory (GW approximation and Bethe-Salpeter equation BSE). In fact, computational solutions and codes have been developed in order to implement these theories and to provide tools to calculate excited state  properties.The present school focuses on these points, covering theoretical, practical, and also numerical aspects of TDDFT and MBPT, and codes implementing them (ABINIT, DP, EXC).

The presentation of the theory will be followed by practical classes and hands-on  tutorials. At the end of the school, students will have sufficient working knowledge to  pursue their projects at their home institution. The participants are expected to have a fair knowledge of DFT prior to the school (see Ref. 1, given in the school’s website) and to be familiar with one plane-wave pseudopotential based software.
Indeed, although at the beginning of the school, we will make sure that the DFT level of all participants is enough in this respect and provide the needed complementary  information and training, the purpose of the school is to go beyond DFT, with hands-on exercices based on plane-wave implementations.

The deadline for application is on 15 April 2015, but giving the limited number of places (around 25) many applications will be considered even before the deadline. Especially student candidates coming from outside EU are encouraged to register soon: an answer to them will be given as soon as possible for VISA and traveling purposes.

In order to apply for the school, please go to: http://www.cecam.org/workshop-1136.html

Photoinitiated processes are not only important for understanding natural phenomena but they also play an undeniable role in the booming fields of renewable energy, material design and medicine. Excited state processes have traditionally been explained from a static point of view, delivering in some cases a biased, incorrect or even incomplete description of the former. The simulation of the dynamics of such processes is therefore fundamental for the quest to understand the chemical and physical mechanisms.
The purpose of this school is to introduce its participants to state-of-the-art methodologies for the simulation of the dynamics of processes in the excited state, following the evolution in time of photoinitiated reactions, one of the priority topics of this call.

The school will be focused in simulating the dynamics of complex molecules. Electronic ab initio or TD-DFT methods would be sketched for obtaining the electronic wavefunctions or densities, that would be afterwards quantum-mechanically propagated. Moreover, several approaches for the treatment of the nuclei will be also provided, from full quantum dynamics to mixed quantum-classical dynamics.

The course is directed at PhD students, and young researchers, beginners in the field, working in theoretical chemistry and molecular physics.

More information at: https://www.cecam.org/workshop-1542.html

The recent development of novel light sources like x-ray free-electron lasers and table-top lasers for high-harmonic generation, which are capable of delivering controllable sequences of intense sub-femtosecond ionizing pulses, has opened the way to monitor and control electron dynamics in atoms and molecules at its natural time scale, the attosecond (Chem. Rev. 2017, DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemrev.6b00453). The description of the coherent superposition of electronic continuum states that the interaction of such pulses with molecules generates goes beyond the capabilities of standard quantum-chemistry packages, which have been designed to describe the lowest bound states. Furthermore, stationary state-based pictures based on lowest-order perturbation theory are, in most cases, inapplicable. The purpose of this school is to introduce state-of-the-art ab-initio, hybrid and TDDFT numerical methods that can cope with ultra-fast dynamics in the electronic continuum of molecules, with an emphasis on unbound states in strong-fields and on the need to go beyond single-active-electron models to properly account for electron correlation. The course is directed to advanced master students, PhD students and young post-doctoral researchers in atomic and molecular physics, theoretical chemistry and applied mathematics, with an interest in developing new software for coherent control of electronic dynamics in systems of chemical interest.

The tutorial will be organized in 5 theoretical sessions and 4 practical sessions in the computer lab. Both theoretical and practical sessions will be of 4 hours. The school comprises four didactic blocks. The first block has an introductory character. It offers an overview of the field and a tutorial on strong field physics. The following three blocks focus on systems of increasing complexity and will be devoted to the description and use of new computational methods for fast time evolution in correlated systems in non-perturbative conditions (see description below). The school will end with a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art results in attosecond pump-probe and strong field molecular science obtained with ab initio “exact” simulations in small systems, on the one side, and with TD-DFT effective-field simulations, capable of coping with larger systems, on the other side. The future perspectives, challenges and mutual interaction of these two complementary approaches will be discussed.

More information: https://www.cecam.org/workshop-1552.html