Events
The XLIC WG1&WG2 Expert Meeting “From Ultrafast to Ultraslow Dynamics in Molecules and Clusters” will be held in the Weizmann Institute of Science Israel , from 23th to 25th January 2017.The Meeting is jointly organized by the Local organizing committee, the team of the conference unit of the Weizmann Institute and COST CM1204 Action (XLIC).
The workshop participation is open to everybody.
Scope and Program of the Meeting
Dynamical processes in molecular and cluster systems play an important role in different disciplines of research including atmospheric and interstellar chemistry, biology, nano-science and more. It is appealing to classify different types of dynamics according to their time scale – from attosecond electronic dynamics, femtosecond and picosecond ro-vibrational motion up to typical nanosecond times of spontaneous radiative processes. However, even in small clusters and biomolecules, coupling of many degree’s of freedom can lead to ultra-slow dynamics extending up to millisecond times.
In recent years, experimental techniques for studying these different dynamics have considerably advanced – from the development of ultrafast light sources, including high-order harmonic generation and free electron laser X-ray facilities, as well as highly controlled ion traps and ion storage rings that allow following a slow evolving time evolution of isolated molecular and cluster ions. On the theoretical side, quantum mechanical calculations provide insight regarding short time scales, while statistical models can describe long time dynamics on the ensemble level.
These communities have developed in parallel and often with little interaction with each-other. The goal of this workshop will be to bridge the gap between the different communities towards a full understanding of molecular and cluster dynamics. For example, it will be valuable to understand the role of initial ultrafast electronic and vibrational rearrangement of an isolated system on its slow decay by statistical fragmentation. Does ultrafast dynamics leading to internal conversion influence delayed recurrent fluorescence events? What is the importance of the coherent vibrational motion for long term processes and spectroscopic probes of isolated interstellar environments or biomolecular systems?
We aim at achieving this goal by bringing together leading experts from the different fields: including atto-second science, femto-chemistry, action spectroscopy, ion storage devices, time-dependent quantum mechanics and statistical physics – in order to promote a common language and shared goals. In particular, participants will be asked to highlight the scientific goals and challenges of each field to promote collaborative efforts. We hope that this conference will generate long term collaborations that will advance our understanding of molecular and cluster science across the different time scales.
Immportant dates
Abstract Submission Deadline: November 1st, 2016
Registration Deadline: January 5th, 2017
Registration
List of invited speakers
Noam Agmon, Hebrew University, Israel
Lars H. Andersen, Aarhus University, Denmark
Itzik Ben-Itzhak, Kansas State University, USA
Valerie Blanchet, CELIA, Bordeaux, France
Anastasia Bochenkova, Moscow State University, Russia
Steen Brondsted Nielsen, Aarhus University, Denmark
Philip Bucksbaum, Stanford, USA
Francesca Calegari, Politecnico Milano, Italy
Lorenz Cederbaum, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Henrik Cederquist, Stockholm University, Sweden
Brett Esry, Kansas State University, USA
Sharly Fleischer, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
Jason Greenwood, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Christiane Koch, Universität Kassel, Germany
Ronni Kosloff, Hebrew University, Israel
Holger Kreckel, MPI-K Heidelberg, Germany
Stephen Leone, UC Berkeley, USA
Nimrod Moiseyev, Technion, Israel
Edvardas Narevicius, Weizmann Institute, Israel
Daniel Neumark, UC Berkeley USA
Thomas Pfeifer, MPI-K Heidelberg, Germany
Igor Schapiro, Hebrew University, Israel
Haruo Shiromaru, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan
Jan. R. R. Verlet, Durham University, UK
Mathias Weber, JILA, Colorado, USA
Roland Wester, Universität Innsbruck , Austria
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
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
