Events
The International school on “The Frontiers of Attosecond and Ultrafast X-ray Science” will be held from 19th to 28th March 2017 in Erice, Sicily, Italy.
The primary objective of this new school is to educate the next generation of scientists who will impact the future of attosecond and ultrafast x-ray science. We anticipate that the school will meet on a regular basis every two years and become a foundation for the ultrafast community. Consequently, the main topics of the course are the following: (i) attosecond science and technology, devoted to the generation and application of attosecond pulses to the investigation of electronic dynamics in atoms, molecules, nanostructures and condensed phases; (ii) fundamentals, methods and applications of free electron lasers, synchrotron radiation, ion collisions in atomic and molecular science. Lectures will cover current developments in theory and experiments but are also intended to give the basics of the field.
Please note that, PhD students and post-docs willing to attend the school can apply for scholarships (deadline 30 January 2017). For more details see: http://www.erice-attosecond.it/registration
The school co-organised by XLIC COST Action and sponsored by Politecnico di Milano, Italian Ministry of Education and Scientific Research, Sicilian Regional Parliament, ELI-ALPS and Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture.
The organizers,
Louis Di Mauro, Alicja Domaracka, Mauro Nisoli and Sergio Martellucci
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
Molecular reaction dynamics has become an integral part of modern chemistry and is set to become a cornerstone for much of the natural sciences. Molecular reaction dynamics is the study of elementary processes and the means of probing them, understanding them, and controlling them. It can be applied to reactions in solution and to reactions on surfaces, exploring the elementary steps in catalysis. Nowadays chemistry requires a molecular level understanding of the reactivity. Moreover, chemical kinetics in an old discipline (born in 1850) that deals with the rates of chemical reaction and how these rates depend on factors such as concentration and temperature. Although it in principle presents a macroscopic point of view, this can be directly related with the molecular point of view. Thus, kinetic or dynamic Monte Carlo simulations allow us to bridge the gap of many orders of magnitude in length and time scales between the processes on the molecular scale and the macroscopic kinetics.
The present school is open to European master and PhD students and postdocs with interest to understand chemical reactions at molecular level and to apply the theoretical and computational chemistry to this matter. First-year students of the Erasmus+ Master European in Theoretical Chemistry and Molecular Modelling will attend to this school as a part of their mandatory subjects although second-year students of this Master but from the rest of Europe it is expected that can attend too. Last year (2017) we made by first time this school and it was very successful.
The school will cover the principal aspects of the kinetics and dynamics of chemical reactions, centred mainly in the theoretical and computational approaches, although some experimental techniques will also be explained.
Registration deadline: March 9, 2018
More Information at https://www.cecam.org/workshop-1529.html
Although computer simulation of the electronic structure and properties of solids began decades ago, only recently the solid state methodologies have become sufficiently reliable that their application has resulted in an increasingly important impact on solid state chemistry and physics. , While a large number of course and tutorials already exists, they are mainly focused on audiences with strong background on solid state physics, and usually devoted to some particular electronic structure code. Far more unusual are the courses designed to teach the solid-state techniques to chemists, thus contributing to eliminate the cultural barriers that still exist between both groups. This school is primarily targeted to PhD students and post docs who are interested or are starting to learning about the application theory methods and techniques to the study of the physics and chemistry of the solid state.
The level of this tutorial corresponds to master or doctorate students in areas of physics and chemistry. After two initial days where the fundamentals of theory of the treatment of the electronic structure of solids will be presented to the students, the remaining of the tutorial will be devoted to the examination of specific and hot areas like characterization of chemical bonding in solids and relationship to macroscopic properties, structure and reactivity at solid surfaces, including layered systems and highly correlated oxides, and magnetic properties. The afternoons will be dedicated to practical hand-on tutorials. Several computational codes are actively being developed, capable of simulating molecules, pure and defective crystals, surface and transport properties, and reactive processes in the bulk and interfaces. Getting familiar with the different codes and their possibilities requires an adequate training that merges theory and practice in substantial amounts.
More info at: https://www.cecam.org/workshop-1553.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.
The tutorial will be organized in 6 theoretical and 6 practical sessions, the latter taking place in the computer lab. The theoretical sessions will be of 3 hours and practical sessions will last 3 hours. The school will comprise 3 didactic blocks.
The first block will have an introductory character and will offer an overview of the field. The following block will focus on mono- and multi-configurational electronic structure methods for the description of excited states. The last block will cover dynamics methodologies. See description below. The school will end with a comprehensive overview (2 hours) of state-of-the-art applications, limitations, suitabilities, future perspectives and challenges of the different static and dynamical approaches described in the school.
More information: 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
