The 3rd meeting organized in the framework of Working Group 2 of COST Action CM1204 (XUV/X-ray light and fast ions for ultrafast chemistry) will take place in Leiden (Netherlands) from May 11 to 13, 2015. It will be an expert meeting centered on Large Interstellar Molecules: “Energetic Processing of Large Interstellar Molecules”.

Three key questions will be addressed during the workshop:

• Which experimental techniques do we need to develop to probe correlated electronic-vibrational dynamics in photo-activated molecules?
• What is the functional role of non-equilibrium vibrational motion for energy and charge transport as well as energy storage in biomolecules? How are these specific molecular motions “selected”?
• Do we have an appropriate theoretical framework to describe and understand these phenomena? Is the predictive power of the current theories enough to accurately predict dynamics and functionality?

More information can be found on the meeting website: http://www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2015/725/info.php3?wsid=725&venue=Snellius

FINANCIAL SUPPORT:
The participation of a limited number of XLIC participants and speakers will be supported with the Action budget. Participants entitled for reimbursement should have been informally notified about their status.

By the end of March, all participants will receive an official invitation to the meeting confirming their eligibility status and highligting some of the COST rules for reimbursement which should be carefully examined before incurring any expense in:

• COST Vademecum, page 19-23, and /or
• the instructions on how to fill the Travel Reimbursement Request Form (TRR)

Since the budget allocated for the meeting is limited, it is highly reccomended keeping the claims for meals and accomodation at the actual level of expensiture during the meeting. Nevertheless. in compliance with COST rules, this subsistence expenses will be reimbursed on the basis of flat rates (no need to show invoices). The applicable flat rates for this meeting, as approved by XLIC Management Committee, are 100 EUR for accommodation and 0 EUR for meals.

For travel expenses actual costs can be claimed on the basis of the receipts provided. (Any restriction applying to travel expenses will be notified to each participant entitled for reimbursement)

IMPORTANT: Participants selected for reimbursement are kindly asked to keep their expenses as low as possible to ensure a wide distribution of the Action budget.

The submission of claims shall be done after the meeting, but, for any non-regular expense or doubt you may have, please, better ask in advance (info@xlic.eu). E.g. fligths departure/arrivals from/to places other than where the eligible participant is working/residing, extra meals, nights, taxi expenses, etc. shall not be reimbursed if permission is not requested before the meeting.

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

Scope

The topic of the 2^nd meeting on the Energetic Processing of Large Molecules (EPoLM-2) is Carbon- and hydrocarbon molecules: from the lab to space. Building on the success of the first meeting at the Lorentz Center in Leiden in May 2015, we aim to bring together scientists from a broad range of research fields (physics, chemistry, astrophysics, and astronomy) to exchange expertise and work together on joint projects. Here, the focus will be on the latest laboratory results on mechanisms and rates for the formation and destruction of carbon and hydrocarbon molecules under space-like conditions. The aim of the meeting is to combine this knowledge with new observations and astrophysical models.

The 2^nd meeting for the members of the XLIC Working Group 2 is organized in the framework of the COST Action CM1204 (XUV/X-ray light and fast ions for ultrafast chemistry). Working Group 2 is concerned with the stability of highly excited and highly charged molecules in the gas phase and their reactivity: interaction with other molecules and formation of new species through isomerization and/or fragmentation.

 Conference site

The meetings will be held during 11-13 and 13-15 April 2016 in Stockholm (Sweden), with one common day (April 13). The conference venue is the AlbaNova University Center, which is located close to the city center and is easily accessed by public transport.

Deadlines     

Registration: 29 February 2016
Abstract submission: 29 February 2016
Note that the registration may be closed earlier due to the capacity of the venue

Support

Speakers invited to attend the second XLIC WG2 meeting (and some selected participants) can be reimbursed for their travel and subsistence expenses in accordance to COST rules. Please, note that no support to attend the EPoLM-2 meeting will be provided by XLIC Action.

Before incurring on any expense, please check COST Vademecum pages 20-24. In particular, please,
– check the supporting documents you should provide in case you are travelling to and from countries other than that where the approved meeting is being held and the country where you are residing. A proper justification and all the documents detailed in page 22 of COST Vademecum should be provided when sending the claim. If not, the claim will be rejected.
– take note on the current definition on Local transport expenses on page 24 of COST Vademecum: now, you should provide tickets/invoices for any trip occurring within the same country if the claim exceed 25 EUR.

Participants are kindly asked to keep their expenses as low as possible and ask only for the amounts they have spent, even if flat rates allow for a higher contribution, so the Action budget can be used to support more activities/participants. Thank you in advance!

Organizing committee

Henrik Cederquist (Stockholm University), Henning Zettergren (Stockholm University), Henning Schmidt (Stockholm University), Ronnie Hoekstra (University of Groningen), and Alexander Tielens (Leiden Observatory).

2^nd MOLIM Training School: Advanced technics for molecular spectroscopy and dynamics

The 2^nd MOLIM Training School focuses on the recent experimental developments occurred in the field of molecular spectroscopy and reaction dynamics. World-wide experts working in European country will be invited to present the most relevant state-of-the-art techniques and their applications. The trainees will benefit from visits of the brand new laser servers ATTOLAB and CILEX as well as of the synchrotron SOLEIL. By team of 2 to 3 trainees, the students will be involved in a laboratory project hosted in several laboratories of the Paris-Saclay University.

The registration is open to Master students, Ph.D students, post-docs and permanent scientist from all European countries. Affiliation to the COST MOLIM is not required to participate to this school. The school can welcome up to 40 Europeans trainees and 10 more students from Paris region.

The registration deadline is fixed at Feb 24th 2017. Booking of rooms by the Committee will be possible up to Jan. 31st 2017.

Registration: http://iramis.cea.fr/meetings/MTS2/index.php

Confirmed speakers:

Knuth Asmis (Leipzig, D)
Valérie Blanchet (Bordeaux, FR)
Juraj Fedor (Prague, CZ)
Gustavo Garcia (Paris-Saclay, France)
Katharina Kohse-Höinghaus (Bielefeld, D)
Anne Lafosse (ISMO, F)
Franck Lépine (Lyon, FR)
Andrew Orr-Ewing (Bristol, UK)
Katharine Reid (Nothingham, UK)
Claire Vallance (Oxford, UK)
Katalin Varjú (Szeged, HU)
Roland Wester (Innsbruck, AU)

Organizing Comittee :

Dr. Lionel Poisson
Pr. Majdi Hochlaf
Dr. Laurent Nahon
Pr. Satchin Soorkia

The CECAM workshop Seeking synergy between dynamics and statistics for non-equilibrium quantum processes will be held in Paris in June 6th-9th.

One of the major difficulties in achieving an accurate theoretical descriptions of non-equilibrium processes in quantum mechanical systems is framed by the desire to provide a representation of the system of interest that is as realistic as possible, in a manner that is computationally tractable. The coupling of electronic and nuclear motion involving excited states, the quantum nature of the nuclear degrees of freedom, and the application of time-dependent driving forces, are just few examples of the effects that must be addressed in order to simulate these processes. Each of these effects poses unique challenges to theoretical progress. A number of exact and approximate quantum dynamics techniques are being developed and refined in order to provide algorithms that respond to the demand for a balance between computational efficiency and physical accuracy. Currently available techniques are typically based upon two different, but equivalent, formulations of many-body quantum mechanics, the wave function approach or the density matrix picture.

The proposed workshop aims to bring together the two principal molecular quantum dynamics communities (wave-function methods and density matrix approaches). The scope is threefold, (i) to identify and explore common goals and obstacles, (ii) help in fostering new ideas to connect these approaches, and bridge the apparent gap between approximate dynamical and statistical descriptions, (iii) identify possible routes to extend dynamics approaches to the domain of statistics.

At the workshop, experts are asked to uncover the fundamental details of the methods in pedagogical lectures. These lectures will be followed by extensive discussions, during which contributed speakers and participants are welcome to put forth some of their doubts and problems in the relation between dynamics and statistics.

Further information can be at:          https://www.cecam.org/workshop-1483.html

Preliminary invited speakers are:

Nandini Ananth (Cornell University, USA) Sara Bonella (CECAM, Switzerland) Irene Burghardt (Goethe University, Germany) Eitan Geva (University of Michigan, USA) E. K. U. Gross (Max-Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, Germany) Raymond Kapral (University of Toronto, Canada) Dvira Segal (University of Toronto, Canada) Jeremy Richardson (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) Graham Worth (University College London, UK)

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

The CECAM workshop entitled ‘Non-adiabatic quantum dynamics: From Theory to Experiments’ (https://www.cecam.org/workshop-0-1638.html) will be held at CECAM HQ in Lausanne, Switzerland from 2nd-6th July 2018.

This workshop aims to consolidate the rapid development in the field of molecular quantum dynamics and increase the synergy between experimentalists and theoreticians in this area. The program features a number of invited presentations from leading theoreticians and experimentalists and will be supplemented by a number of talks selected from submitted abstracts.

We are looking forward to welcoming you to Lausanne.

Tom Penfold on behalf of all of the co-organisers.

The ESPA 2018 (11th Congress on Electronic Structure Principles and Applications) will be held in Toledo, Spain on 17-19 July 2018

ESPA is a series of international conferences covering all aspects of Theoretical Chemistry from methods development to application to different fields.

The Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Universidad de Castilla la Mancha and APQTC (Asociación para la Promoción de la Química Teórica y Computacional), the organizers of this conference are delighted and honored to host this ESPA conference in the historic city of Toledo, World Heritage Site, during the summer of 2018.

Registration will open in January 15, 2018.

More information here: http://www.espa2018.com