Hi everyone,

Professor Berkelbach from the University of Chicago will be visiting Harvard next Thursday (March first) for THEOCHEM. His young research group focuses on spectroscopy and electronic-structure methods such as coupled-cluster, diagrammatic methods, with applications to materials (http://berkelbachgroup.uchicago.edu/).

If you want to meet Prof. Berkelbach and have lunch or dinner with him, please let me know. 

His talk is next Wednesday at MIT, 4:15 pm at MIT building four room 163, you can find the abstract is below.

Best,

Tere

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Quantum chemistry in nanoscale and solid-state materials

Density-functional theory and its descendants are the workhorse methods of computational materials science, despite a number of now well-known shortcomings.  In a different direction, I will provide a broad overview of systematically-improvable wavefunction-based methods for condensed-phase electronic structure calculations.  I will review the challenges of electronic structure in bulk materials, touching on aspects of many-body theory, diagrammatic techniques, and open-source software.  With motivating examples drawn from recent work on low-dimensional semiconductors, I will describe our ongoing research agenda aimed at using deterministic methods (especially coupled-cluster theory) and stochastic methods (quantum Monte Carlo) for the accurate description of condensed-phase electronic structure, excited-state properties, and spectroscopic observables.